


dance this silence down (the emergency room remix)

by Fahye



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2017-12-28 16:36:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 54,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/994140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's sitting in a car with all of his belongings in the back seat and his hands wrapped around the steering wheel, admitting to himself that a stupid, dizzy firework of a one-night-stand with a man he'd barely known is one of the only bright memories he has right now. </p><p>[In which Enjolras and Grantaire make some music, make some terrible decisions, and make a habit out of doing everything in the wrong order.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The People Sing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/959971) by [littledust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledust/pseuds/littledust). 



> "You have to write that DJ Enjolras story for me!" I said.  
> "If you want to focus on Cosette, I'll do the e/R remix," I said.  
> "It'll be fun," I said, LIKE A DAMN FOOL.
> 
> The moral here is probably self-apparent. You don't _have_ to read littledust's story first, but you should read it anyway, for context and for a lot more Enjolras, and because this one will weave in and out of hers.
> 
> This is a Grantaire story; as such, it features frank portrayals of depression and alcoholism, so tread with care if those are likely to be a problem.

That January it's snowing like Portland is auditioning for the role of Montreal, Grantaire is failing gently out of college, and Katy Perry is all over the radio asking him does he ever feel like a house of cards, one blow from caving in?

He does, is the problem. And paper thin, and buried deep, and yes, like a waste of space. It's gotten so bad that he's started flinching whenever he hears the opening notes of the song, which -- given that the café from which he will soon be unceremoniously fired tends to have Top 40 stations blaring at all hours -- is all the fucking time. The perky lyrics of the chorus are no help at all, because most days it's an effort for Grantaire to feel like a full human being, let alone some sort of metaphorical lightshow.

It's a bad winter, the kind that prompts people to curl up inside their houses and watch the sky, but there have been bad winters before. It doesn't explain why it feels like his world is contracting. There is no good excuse. Nothing he can put his finger on and say this, here, is why I woke up this morning and took two hours to persuade myself that it would be worth getting out of bed.

He finds himself saying No, a lot, and Grantaire doesn't know who he's more irritated with: the people who try to wheedle him into changing his mind and being social once the No has been delivered, or the people who take him at his word.

Paul falls into the former group. However, Grantaire suspects this is because Paul is his housemate, and is therefore harbouring nefarious plans to get Grantaire out into the world so that he can have Grantaire's room attacked by professional cleaners.

"It's barely fifteen minutes on foot, Grantaire."

"I told you, I don't want to go."

"You can drink just as cheaply at the club," Paul points out. "It's Thursday. Two for one."

"I'm tired. I'm going to have an early night."

"You slept until noon."

Grantaire looks at him, trying to work out if there is an acceptable way to say that at the moment he could probably sleep twenty hours out of every day, and would in fact prefer it to being awake.

Before he can, though, Paul gives an impatient twitch of his jaw and says, "Come on, it's that DJ you asked me about. You know? Tessa left that mix CD here after a party, and you really liked that one track on it? Well, that's the guy who's playing tonight."

That elbows something aside in Grantaire's brain, enough that he sits up and started to notice things, like how stale his room smells. He does remember that track; if he closed his eyes now he could probably hum the melody, and hear in his memory the beats woven over and under the notes.

"Shit," he says. "Really?"

"Go and have a fucking shower," Paul says, quite kindly. "I'll find you something to wear."

By the time Grantaire emerges from the shower, feeling cranky and resigned and a lot more awake, Tessa has arrived and is helping her boyfriend dig through the wreckage of Grantaire's closet.

"Hey," Grantaire protests, hands going to the towel tucked round his waist.

Tessa shoots him a speakingly disdainful look and holds out the shirt she's unearthed from God only knows where. The fabric is a steel blue shade so overwashed that it's gone almost heather-grey, and the black logo on it is faded. Grantaire rubs a hand through his hair, sending a trickle of water into his own eyes, and is about to deny ownership when he recognises it.

"Jesus, that one's ancient."

"Well, it's clean," says Tessa. She gives the shirt a maternal shake and then stands there with her hands on her hips until he's pulled it on. She gives a sort of surprised hum and looks at him, eyes wide. "Okay," she says finally. "I guess we're getting you out of the house _and_ getting you laid tonight."

"What," says Grantaire, because seriously, what. It's just a shirt.

He is pleased with how comfortable it is, though; hundreds of washes have left it soft and yielding, gently snug against his skin. He was fifteen the first time he wore it, and it pulls a bit when he moves both of his arms at once, but there's a lot of stretch in the tired fabric.

Tessa ogles him critically all through his awkward, hopping attempts to pull his black jeans on without releasing the towel, and Paul just yawns in the doorway with a lack of concern that might be insulting if they weren't the most completely fucking _married_ pair of twenty-year-olds that Grantaire has ever met.

The shirt comes in for further comment when Tessa's friend -- Daisy? Diana? Grantaire hears the introduction clear as a bugle note and then promptly forgets it -- turns up to the house for pre-club shots of white rum. Grantaire finds himself explaining that he and a friend made it for a screenprinting project in art and textiles class, submitting it along with a 100% bullshit spiel about the band they'd invented and how tour shirts were a unique artform because they celebrated a transient communal moment.

They got an A. Fucking high school.

"So it's a shirt for a band that never existed," the girl says, slowly.

"Sort of?"

"I _told_ you," Tessa says to her friend, which makes no sense at all.

Actually, the band did exist, for the duration of three earnest jam sessions in Grantaire's garage. But Grantaire's friend was way more into the idea of being in a band than the actual work involved in producing music, and Grantaire was more inclined to shut himself in his room and let his mind drift as he chased the chords of his favourite songs, forming traps with his bent fingers to capture the sounds that were buried beneath the vocal layers.

"That's a nice scarf, I guess," is D-whatever's next comment, as they're arming themselves against the knifing cold of the night air.

Grantaire, feeling more balanced now that he's had a couple of drinks, pauses in the act of tying a second knot in the thing. His scarf is thin and a sort of red colour and he grabbed it out of the top of a Goodwill bin for something like two bucks. It's the only scarf he owns. He'd suspect the girl of hitting on him, but she's already made several gushing references to her Peace Corps boyfriend.

"We're going to miss the cover-free deadline," says Paul, who is easygoing as anything right up until he sees a chance to save some money. "Tess, seriously, your hair looks fine, now can we _leave_."

It turns out that half the city has the same bright idea as Paul and has hopefully showed up to the club ten minutes before the cover charge comes into effect, so they get stuck in a queue. Grantaire buries his hands in his pockets, ungloved fingertips drumming against the ragged lining of his coat in time with the beat that becomes louder and less atonal the closer they edge towards the door. His left hand is trying to make chords, but he's always struggled with pitch -- appreciates it in others, can sing unerringly within someone else's key, but name a note and there's nothing in his head but a glaring silence -- so he just ends up pressing his fingers into his own leg and forgetting the cold, forgetting the white noise of the traffic, until they reach the head of the line and the club belches out neon heat and swallows them up.

Grantaire makes a beeline for the bar, less because he's in any hurry to get drunk than because nursing a drink is a good excuse not to be dancing. Club music has never been his favourite, but given the right mood or enough shots he can reach a silvery plateau of appreciation for the music's backbone. And right now he can recognise in the music the same deft touch with rhythm that caught his attention on Tessa's CD.

DJ Enjolras. Tessa told him the name on their way over. She had, she said with poorly concealed pride, been listening to his podcasts for _months_ , and he didn't do many tours outside of LA so they were lucky to be seeing him do a set in person.

Grantaire is waiting at the bar behind a group of women, all of whom seem to be afflicted with alcoholic indecision, when DJ Enjolras moves into a better angle of light behind his decks and Grantaire realises just how lucky he is to be _seeing_ him, period.

Enjolras is wearing a button-down shirt that could be searingly scarlet in reality, but which in the uneven shadows of the club looks the same dirty dark red as Grantaire's scarf. A silver watch flashes with every movement of his wrist, his hair emerges in an unlikely wave beneath his headphones, and he has his eyes closed, his face a picture of concentration.

His fucking _face._

Maybe California is full of people who look like that. But -- well, Grantaire has seen as much TV as anyone, and he's never felt anything like what he's feeling now: this nearly violent urge to run his hands through a stranger's hair and press his mouth to the hollow of their neck, to capture their attention and hold it like a high note, shimmering at the edge of earshot, forever.

What makes it worse is that he can't divorce the way Enjolras looks from the music pouring out from beneath his hands. It's all one stream of seamless appreciation, effortless desire.

" _Hey_ ," says someone next to Grantaire, right in his ear, with an irritation suggesting that this isn't his first attempt to get Grantaire's attention. "Are you going to order? There's a line here, man."

It's the most reluctant Grantaire has been in months to turn his eyes towards a person willing to sell him a drink. As he's shuffling through an absurd amount of dollar notes in search of the twenty he knows is hiding somewhere, the music begins to quieten. The impressively pierced woman behind the bar, who has been very obliging about obeying the spirit of the law rather than the letter -- she nodded along to Grantaire's shouted explanation that a double shot for the price of a single was just as fair as two-for-one beer -- takes this opportunity to tell him that his hair is cute.

"And that shirt brings out your eyes," she adds, and winks.

Maybe Tessa was right about the shirt; not that Grantaire is going to muster much more than a smile in return. He picks up his drink and extricates his change from the sticky dish.

The music is fading away now, the dancefloor falling out of rhythm, and from the speakers comes the static sound of someone clearing their throat. Grantaire locates a free piece of wall, tucks his money and fake ID back into his wallet and cradles his sweating glass in his hands, resigned to the fact that a perfectly good case of lust-at-first-sight is now going to be marred by whatever self-important Hollywood editorialising will spill from the mouth of someone who isn't prepared to let their music, no matter how skillfully crafted, stand on its own merits.

He's looking right at DJ Enjolras, fondly committing the lines of his bare forearms and the focused set of his lips to memory, when the music throbs right down to a whisper, Enjolras looks up, and those lips open. What comes out isn't a promotional spiel, or a vague set of syllables designed to lull a crowd into pausing and drinking. Instead, the DJ tears straight into a speech about the deplorable state of the commercial music industry, and Portland as a fresh hub of artistic and musical freedom in the US.

If Grantaire didn't have deeply-held convictions about wasting alcohol when he's paid scandalous club prices for it, he might be tempted to spray the contents of his mouth all over the floor. Or over the closest three people; the club is becoming more tightly-packed by the minute, and not even two-for-one drinks can explain the size of the crowd. This guy clearly has a following.

But is it a political following? Tessa said _podcasts_ , implying more than just a few tracks strung together, but Grantaire can't see much fervour in the faces of Enjolras' audience. They're swaying on their feet, alert but impatient, waiting for the talking to finish so that the music can start up again. And for someone who clearly knows how to monitor the mood of a dancefloor, Enjolras isn't letting this discourage him in the slightest. He stands straighter, his hands animated, his face alight with conviction.

Grantaire bites his cheek and then downs most of his drink in one quick, stinging blur, because this is it, isn't it, the fucking irony driving his dreary self-contempt: Grantaire loves passion. He always has. He's always fallen hardest and fastest for the high achievers, the bright stars with a talent or a cause burning behind their tongues.

And then there's him, himself, not giving much of a shit about anything at all those days, and despising himself for it in a bitter, barbed-wire sort of way; a loathing that lives right next to his skin and has long stopped making him bleed.

All of it seems inevitable, somehow, a cruel collision of things that the universe knows he would want. Suddenly he remembers that he wanted to stay at home and sleep. The club full of people, which a second before seemed little more than a strobing background, crashes its closeness and energy and noise over his ears like a cymbal and leaves him ringing. His chest is tight, his head too hot. Right over his heart a small, sour despair unfurls like the arms of a tiny galaxy.

He finishes his drink. Enjolras' speech over, the music restarts, surging casually up into a fast beat. The joy of it catches at Grantaire's jagged edges.

Half of him wants strongly to leave. The other half would bargain away a great many days of his life -- including every damned day of this grey January and the off-white December that came before it, and all the miserably foreseeable months -- in exchange for another hour watching Enjolras try to spin revolution out of nothing like some stubborn fairytale thing.

So for that hour and the next, he watches. He listens, too, and can admit that it's the best night of music he's ever experienced that doesn't involve someone putting their hands or their mouth to an actual _instrument_ , but mostly he watches.

At one point Tessa emerges from the mass of people he's been ignoring and drags him onto the dancefloor. She's grinning and pink with sweat and there's an uncomplicated glow of adoration on her face when she looks at DJ Enjolras, just as unthreatening as the way she eyed Grantaire's shirt and the way she dances with him now. She knows how to keep her happiness in boxes and wear her loves easily. Grantaire wonders how she learned to do it.

He still isn't drunk enough to really enjoy dancing, but he unfocuses and loses himself for the space of three songs, pausing only when Paul joins them. Paul's hands bristle with bottles of water, and he presses one on Grantaire and says something that Grantaire has no hope of hearing. It's _loud_. They've moved through the irregular currents of the dancefloor and now, Grantaire realises, they're standing directly beneath a stack of speakers, within a few yards of the stage. Enjolras is very close. Grantaire can see that it's a bracelet and not a watch that shines on his wrist, and that he's tapping one of his feet and checking something on his phone, letting the current track play itself out.

Grantaire twists the cap off his water and takes a gulp, and Enjolras looks down into the crowd and his gaze slides and _snags_ , perhaps on the one person who isn't moving the way the music is urging him to move.

Their eyes meet and Grantaire thinks, God, he's young.

It's a stupid thing to think. Obvious. Of course he's young; he doesn't look much older than Grantaire himself, if at all. He probably gets carded at every one of his own gigs. And you can't, Grantaire, thinks, maintain that kind of fervent moral idealism for very long in the face of hedonism and apathy.

He doesn't know yet how wrong he is about that.

There's water pooled in Grantaire's mouth where he's forgotten to swallow. He gulps it down, and feels the plastic of the bottle click and dent in his tightening grip, but he doesn't look away. He isn't fooling himself that anything of what he wants isn't obvious as neon on his face; he can feel the naked heat of it.

Enjolras looks back at him for a long moment, eyes sweeping up and down in a way that leaves Grantaire unsure if he's being checked out or scanned like a barcode. Then a flickering little frown passes over Enjolras' face and he looks away. Which is only to be expected. The abyss of Grantaire's self esteem is more than happy to leap in with twenty reasons why a semi-famous genius DJ with an activist's mind and a face like a perfect chord of male beauty would find him utterly dismissible.

Because he's tipsy and trying to prove something, or maybe just to be a dick, he doesn't follow his first instinct and head back to his friendly piece of wall. He stays there, under the sound-shadow of the speakers, and keeps up his mediocre excuse for dancing long past the point where his feet start to ache. He doesn't make eye contact with Enjolras again.

"There you go," Paul yell-mumbles into his ear, as the clock ticks on and the Thursday night dancefloor thins. "I knew getting out of the house would be good for you."

Grantaire feels like he's looking at Paul's life across a vast fucking chasm, but he also remembers how to be a vaguely decent human being, so he just says, "Yeah. Thanks."

Not long after that Paul and Tessa bundle themselves into a cab heading towards Tessa's apartment, and Grantaire finds himself in a rambling, semi-serious conversation about house wines and the Spice Girls with the pierced woman behind the bar, all the more bizarre because he's starting to sober up by that point. It's mostly procrastination against the time when he has to step back out into the thin and quiet night.

As the house lights blink on the club starts to look greyish and small. The girl on coat check, looking bored to the point of homicide and surrounded by empty pigeonholes, hands Grantaire his coat and scarf before he can even pass her his ticket. And just like that Grantaire is standing on the street wondering for the millionth time if he'd enjoy life more if he took up smoking.

He slips his hands into his pockets and then almost trips off the curb as someone knocks right into his back, all elbows, coming out of the door that Grantaire is blocking.

Neither of them apologise. Grantaire turns around and finds himself wrapping his unbuttoned coat tightly around himself like a scandalised romance heroine caught _deshabillé._

"Shit," he says, aloud, before he can think better of it.

He waits for DJ Enjolras to turn and walk away, figuring that if nothing else he'll be able to appreciate the view, but that doesn't happen. Enjolras finishes shrugging on his jacket, looking disgustingly unbothered by the cold for a Californian, and his face moves through something wide-eyed and indecipherable before it does that flickering frown thing again.

Fuck it, Grantaire decides, and takes a deliberate step forward. "Good set tonight."

"Thanks," says Enjolras, blankly.

"So," Grantaire goes on, "I was going to ask if you're _actually_ on a one-man vendetta against the evils of the music industry, or if that's just part of your stage persona, but nobody would come up with a persona that fucking naïve."

He'd put money on either earnest evangelism or anger as the most likely response. Instead, Enjolras simply looks irritated, with a perilous twitch of something that might even be amusement trying to intervene at the corner of his mouth.

"And who says I'm just one man?"

"Ooh," says Grantaire, "do you have a _posse_?"

Enjolras ignores that. "There's nothing naïve about believing in the possibility of change."

"Bull _shit_ ," says Grantaire, starting to enjoy himself. "You can make all the speeches you want, but power's the only thing that can make change happen."

"And collective action can have great power."

"Collective -- so you do have a posse? Or is it a following? Because I saw a lot of _fans_ here tonight, but none of them seemed particularly bothered by exploitative contracts and market saturation."

"Everything starts somewhere," Enjolras says, pure and clear, like belief is the easiest thing in the world. Grantaire's heart gives a bit of a kick, as though to remind him that an hour ago he was fantasizing about the fall of this guy's hair, which is even more insanely tempting without the headphones.

He tries, and mostly fails, to wipe away the besotted expression that he can feel currently parting his own lips. Hey, at least they're talking. He might as well bask in the moment.

"I'm Grantaire, by the way."

"Enjolras."

Grantaire reaches out and shakes the formally proferred hand, amused. "Seriously? You introduce yourself as -- wait, no, is that your actual _name_?"

Enjolras frowns and took his hand back. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Your DJ name is just...your name."

"So?"

"That is a serious failure of creativity," Grantaire says. "Especially from someone who can stand in front of a room full of drunk twenty-somethings and make it seem like Wordsworth was talking about the subjugation of vocal artists instead of _Switzerland_ , come on now, I think I'm entitled to expect better."

Enjolras doesn't look irritated any more. He looks like he's bitten into an apple only to discover that it tastes like bacon: maybe not unhappy, but certainly as though he's still working out how he's supposed to react. He's staring, his face mobile, catching his lower lip in his teeth. Grantaire's coat has fallen open again; he's cold and distracted by the shape of Enjolras' mouth and disastrously unable to stop talking.

"But I guess you don't really have a branding issue, this whole Liberty-leading-the-people thing is clearly working for you -- hell, I'd walk over hot fucking coals to sleep with you and that probably goes the same for an easy seventy percent of --"

That, it seems, is when Enjolras decides how he's going to react: he reaches out, closes a hand in the front of Grantaire's stupid soft clinging shirt, and drags him close.

Grantaire feels himself inhale as though slapped, heady and sharp. He tilts his face up in blatant invitation, and Enjolras kisses him.

It's careful at first, hesitant, but Grantaire presses himself even closer and closes his eyes and with a hiss of breath Enjolras _changes_ , a transition clumsier than anything that sprang from his decks tonight, and all of a sudden it's the selfish, searing, claiming kind of kiss that Grantaire has wanted since he first saw Enjolras lift his eyes to the careless crowd and needle them with his voice.

Grantaire groans, encouraging, and Enjolras' fingers tighten in his shirt, knuckles brushing his stomach. Enjolras' body is very warm in the places where it's pressed against Grantaire's. Grantaire wants to undress him on the half-lit pavement, wants deliriously to put his mouth everywhere at once, wants to take him _apart_ \-- there are so many things Grantaire wants that his brain panics through a flurry of obscenity and lands on the fact that Enjolras tastes slightly of mint. It's a flavour of polite morning-afters, domestic Sundays, not these impulsive, urgent kisses on a sidewalk, trying to learn someone's gasps for the first time. Grantaire knows that he's probably all sour bourbon, himself, but what the hell.

Enjolras makes a sound against him, a soft growl like a contented predator, and then pulls back far enough that they can focus on one another's faces.

"I'm going to. I mean, I have. A hotel room," Enjolras says. He takes a deep breath and some of the speechifying poise comes back into his voice. "I'm staying somewhere, I think it's close by."

" _Yes_ ," says Grantaire.

"I didn't ask you anything."

Grantaire nudges his cold nose up against Enjolras' cheek and kisses the side of his mouth, disbelief still warring with a hot tantrum of need that he's barely keeping at bay. "Yeah, you really did."

They sit straight and side-by-side in the back of the cab. Grantaire figures from the forbidding silence that there's probably some sort of groupie etiquette guide that would frown upon his climbing into Enjolras' lap and grinding down, or leaning across and chasing the taste of mint deep into his mouth. This awkward pause is terrible, though. He has to grit his teeth against the stream of nonsensical associations that wants to bubble out of him. Enjolras' fingers twist and tap in unlikely patterns, but he doesn't touch Grantaire at all.

It lasts for almost ten excruciating minutes, and then Enjolras' hands still and form determined fists on his knees.

"I can't believe you know _Thoughts of a Briton_ ," Enjolras bursts out, like he's been personally victimised by Grantaire's knowledge of overwrought Napoleonic imagery, and Grantaire covers his face with one end of his scarf and starts laughing shakily because Jesus, what is he _doing_. He isn't whatever Enjolras thinks he is. He's barely holding his life together, he's achingly obsessed with a man he's just met, and sure, he's read some poetry, but that doesn't make him -- anything.

He wants this, though. The wanting is like pressurised air turning his skin taut, the largest emotion he's felt in weeks, and he's terrified that at any moment he'll step on a tack and the whole thing will deflate.

The cab drops them outside the kind of hotel that would probably give you individually wrapped soaps, but would buy them in bulk and not bother with a monogram. Enjolras pays the fare and Grantaire hovers, counting streetlights and touching his thumb to his own lower lip. Much more silence and one of them, no prizes for guessing who, might realise that they could do a lot better. They've lost the beat, and they need it back.

"Between the two of us," Grantaire says, "you think we'd be able to manage a basic rhythm," and when Enjolras turns that questioning frown towards him, he frames it with his thumbs and presses his open mouth to it, teasing with his tongue. He can be selfish too. He can reach out and grab everything he wants, because this isn't going to be the beginning of some half-sweet and half-awkward courtship. It's going to be sex in a hotel room between someone more image than reality, and a wreck in search of an idol. It's going to be nothing more than alcohol, and abstract ideas, and a push for something warm in these past-midnight minutes.

So Grantaire slides his hands up into that ridiculous hair and pulls Enjolras forward until Grantaire's back is against the chill of the nearest wall. He looks right into Enjolras' intense, devastating eyes and he shivers at what he sees there, something in him going molten in response. He sighs against Enjolras' mouth before ducking his head to escape, to be out of that focus, to press a kiss that's worshipful against the smooth line of Enjolras' neck.

It means nothing. Take whatever. Be whomever.

"I need you to fuck me," he says, into the skin below Enjolras' ear. A shudder runs through the man's whole body and Grantaire bares his teeth in a smile; bites gently over the pulse. "You probably want to tell me that it isn't _need_ , that human beings just need air and water and food and--" an open-mouthed kiss on the same spot, this time, tasting the warm salt of sweat like a poor echo of the blood beating against his lips "--freedom."

"Fuck," Enjolras whispers, and shoves his hips forward, just a glorious little, pinning Grantaire in place against the brick.

"You'd be wrong," Grantaire says, hearing the crack of his own voice as he tries to concentrate, to spill it all out while he's brave enough and high enough on the feel of Enjolras growing hard against him and the lingering taste of his skin. "I need you, let's say less than oxygen but more than water, I need you to work me open and fuck me into the bed until neither of us can breathe, I saw you bite your lips when you looked at me and I thought, if I don't get my mouth on his cock then I'm going to fucking _die_."

Enjolras has gone kind of white and looks on the verge of hyperventilating or snarling, Grantaire doesn't know which and also doesn't care, because the next moment Enjolras has one hand at the back of his neck and the other beneath his coat and shirt, sly on the bare skin of his waist, holding him firm. One, two kisses that are more like warfare, hot and merciless, probing Grantaire's mouth like an open wound, and then Enjolras drops his head and stands there, breathing unevenly, his forehead pressed to the side of Grantaire's.

"Right." Enjolras says. There's a new roughness to his voice that's intoxicating. "Inside. We're going inside, I want --"

Grantaire licks the bruised tingle from his lips and says over the sound of his own heart, "Whatever you want. Whatever."

Enjolras groans as he steps back, like he's moving painfully against gravity to do so, and the hand at Grantaire's neck slips down to take hold of his wrist.

There's a silent moment where they stand paused, like that, almost holding hands. Grantaire is staring right at Enjolras and something passes over that perfect face, a ripple of guileless and very human nerve, and Grantaire wonders whether perhaps he isn't the only one who is granting himself one night of not-being, of wonderful greedy otherness.

But then Enjolras tightens his fingers and looks away, leading Grantaire towards the hotel with no more than a single confident tug, and Grantaire remembers that he is nobody and Enjolras is -- Enjolras, beautiful and famous and high-minded.

He takes a deep breath of the cold air and lets himself be led inside.


	2. Chapter 2

It takes another year for Grantaire to reach LA.

First there's the disastrous three-month-long liaison with a pretty pre-law student who uses words like _liaison_ , styles her copper-penny hair in a sharp bob, and has the unfortunate tendency to mistake subclinical depression for an interesting personality.

Then there are the quiet, ugly death throes of his academic career, culminating in an even uglier fight with his parents. Grantaire lies half-off his bed, listening to their voices boil out from his phone's speakers and drinking room-temperature rosé that the pre-law student left at his house and he never got rid of because, well, free booze is free booze, no matter if it tastes like rancid candy. He lies there and drinks and listens and feels like wood slowly petrifying into stone, utterly unable to summon more than a few rudely mumbled words, let alone tell them _why_ and _what happened_ and _why hadn't he said anything_ \-- and of course, most terrifyingly of all, _what now_?

After that he has a really bad week, like, a really fucking _awful_ week, and ends up shivering on the floor of a hospital waiting room with his cheek in a sloppy pool of his own vomit, trying to pretend he's too far gone to notice the disgust in the faces of everyone around him or the awkward pity in the voice of the orderly who helps him up into the wheelchair.

He tells himself there aren't going to be any more weeks like that one.

And then, to his surprise, there aren't.

Maybe if there were he'd do something large and bold, like bundle up all of his art supplies and throw them into the Willamette. Instead there are long, interminable days of brushing dust from the stickers adorning his unopened bass case and watching cracks form like desert creekbeds in the palettes he can't be bothered to clean. Sitting in front of a half-started painting or with an open sketchbook on his lap, white-minded. Blank. Scraping together his mental determination, _just do something, just do anything, it doesn't matter what_ , and still coming to the end of each hour having accomplished nothing.

That hurts. That's worse than the drought in his mouth every morning and the way his stomach never feels entirely right. No art, no music -- that is a worm chewing its agonising way through the scraps of what he knows to be real and good about himself.

After he turns up late to one too many morning shifts, the café simply stops putting him on the roster. Grantaire's parents are still giving him enough money to make rent, on the condition that he works some kind of job as well; he figures he can hide his unemployment from them for a fairly long time, but soon he'll stop being able to afford food. He could look harder for jobs, probably, but there doesn't seem to be a lot out there for college dropouts who, when asked why they should be hired, can't think of a single truthful reason, and instead end up making jokes.

Facebook saves him. Or at least, a Facebook post from a cousin that Grantaire doesn't know very well, except as one of the many high-achieving offspring that Grantaire's aunt likes to hold over his mother's head in their ongoing passive-aggressive war.

_Sorry to bug everyone again, but we're running out of time, so: if you know anyone in the LA area who might be interested in a housesitting gig over the four months that we'll be in South Africa, please message or email me. We're about to resort to advertising online, but we'd prefer someone at least vouched for by a friend._

Grantaire isn't sure why he does it, except that he's fed up with everything and everyone, himself most of all, and he doesn't even have college to tie him to Portland any more. He can be broke and miserable anywhere, right?

He opens a private message and writes, _If you can't find anyone else, I'm looking for a place to stay for a while._

Sophie hasn't seen him since her wedding three years ago, which was memorable for Grantaire's father getting viciously drunk and throwing a folding chair through the side of a lawn marquee. He isn't surprised that there's a pause of two days before Sophie replies, _Hi, Grantaire. I thought you were in Portland?_

_I'm moving_ , Grantaire writes.

Sophie and her husband Marc must decide that the devil you know is better than, well, Craigslist, because two months later Grantaire turns twenty-one, has a birthday-party-slash-farewell-bash of which he remembers almost nothing the next morning, and then piles his bass and three suitcases into his car and drives down I-5 to Los Angeles.

For the first few hours of the journey he plays the _Californication_ album on repeat, half for the appropriate nature of the title and half for the sheer comfort of nostalgia. He decided at the age of twelve that he was going to grow up to be the second coming of Flea, and one of the first things he was able to pick out on his third-hand bass was the opening of Otherside, simple and clean and so low it was thrilling.

_It's time to leave this town_ , he sings with hungover satisfaction, the breeze through the car's windows snatching up his voice. _It's time to get away._

For the rest of it, he pulls up a podcast playlist that he spent a grim evening downloading as he demolished a bottle of red wine, and makes his way through DJ Enjolras' backlog of mixes.

Thanks to Google he spent hours on the Café Musain website last winter, reading long blog posts about injustice and recording contracts, and torturing himself with the fact that just reading the text was enough for him hear them in Enjolras' voice. He knew how that passionate voice sounded wrecked with sex and filthy promises. He'd heard it whispering into his hair before fading into sleep.

After a week of that, he hated his pathetic self enough to delete the bookmark and never touch it again.

Now, though, he has nearly a year's distance to wrap his denials in, and he's driving straight towards the city where Enjolras can be found -- according to the much-improved website he ventured onto last week -- playing every night of the week at this bar with a twee name.

Not that he decided to move to LA because -- well. Free rent is free rent. DJ Enjolras doesn't factor into that.

Grantaire left Portland in the early hours of the morning and he's well into Los Angeles by ten at night, tired but restlessly buzzing with coffee and change. He's memorised the route to Sophie's house, where a spare key is waiting for him in a needlessly convoluted hiding place, but instead he pulls into the parking lot of an In-N-Out and opens the ABC's website on his phone.

Every night of the week.

You're a fucking idiot and this is a terrible idea, he tells himself, but he opens his maps app and hits Get Directions anyway.

And then it's almost eleven o'clock and he's parked probably illegally on the street, staring at the ABC sign through the windscreen. He's sitting in a car with all of his belongings in the back seat and his hands wrapped around the steering wheel, admitting to himself that a stupid, dizzy firework of a one-night-stand with a man he'd barely known is one of the only bright memories he has right now, and even though it was nothing, it _meant nothing_ , he's been warming his hands at its embers all this time.

So he just. He just wants to see him again, to see if anything will flare into life.

The music is like a welcoming hand, the production style familiar in the way that anything would be if you'd been pouring one DJ's work into your ears for hours and hours with nothing else to focus on but the next stretch of road. The neon of the club's sign and the black floor tiles are just the right kind of cheerfully trashy, but the walls are a pale nothing kind of colour that was clearly chosen when someone was trying to make the space look bigger. It's a poor choice for a club that is so clearly centred around a single stage. The ABC is going to be a small venue no matter what, so its owners might as well embrace it and get a bit of joyful clutter going.

Thinking critically about interior decorating is usually a sign that Grantaire hasn't painted in a long time, or needs to be drunk. Or both.

He makes it within arm's reach of the bar before the low burn in his chest overcomes his cowardice, takes control of his body, and spins him to face the DJ booth on one side of the stage.

It's pretty anticlimactic. Enjolras is recognisable but alien in the light from his laptop, and it's no more of a punch to the gut than pure memory could be.

Pure memory has a lot to say for itself, though, as does _im_ pure memory, and so Grantaire stares with his hands in his pockets until something small and hard hits the side of his face and bounces off. When he turns to look, one of the bartenders has another peanut balanced on her outstretched palm, fingers poised to launch it in Grantaire's direction. The other bartender, busy removing caps from a series of bottles, is giving her a look that's mixed disapproval and amusement.

Grantaire blinks and slides onto a barstool, and the peanut-flicking bartender lets the second nut fall into a bin behind the bar instead.

"What's wrong with _you_?" she asks. "I was starting to wonder if you'd sustained a dancefloor head injury."

The space is at least large enough that the noise levels at the bar allow for conversation without having to raise one's voice too far. The bartender has a sleek swish of black hair, caught in a ponytail at one side of her neck, and stunning eyes. She sounds curious but not like she honestly cares, which is good. Grantaire probably wouldn't tell her if he thought it might matter.

"Do you ever feel--wait, no, that's Katy Perry again." He props his chin on his arms, and tries again. "Can I get a tequila and tonic? Thanks. I'd try and pass off whatever lotion-in-the-basket expression is on my face with the excuse that I've driven across almost two whole states today, while dismally hungover, but the truth is I'm becoming reacquainted with my unfortunate crush on your DJ. It's all right, I probably won't come back here again. No. That's a lie. I definitely will. But I probably won't hurl myself bodily onto the stage, if that helps."

She raises her eyebrows at him, probably regretting asking the question in the first place. Grantaire makes a what-can-you-do face back, and tries to laugh.

"You must get a lot of this, huh? Starstruck fans who threw themselves at him while he was on tour, and think they're oh so special because they got one night out of it."

The bartender's finger freezes on the tonic water tap, sending white fizz frothing over the edge of the glass and onto her apron. She mutters a curse in Spanish and dabs at it with a dishcloth before turning her attention back to Grantaire.

"You're messing with me," she says, pushing the glass across the bar.

"What?"

"No," she says finally. "I can guarantee you that I _don't_ see many people who --" She pauses. "Are you sure you're thinking of the right guy?"

"DJ Enjolras? Prone to declaiming the evils of the _industry_ part of the music industry? Touchingly convinced that he'll be able do something about it if he just gets angry enough?"

"I don't -- Enjolras doesn't tour often. Where did you say you were from?"

"Portland."

She purses her lips for a second and then lets out a low, incredulous laugh -- "Wait here a second, will you?" -- and darts sideways to catch the other bartender by the elbow. She leans in and talks to him, making a few up-and-down gestures in Grantaire's direction. Grantaire would like another drink or four in order to process whatever's happening right now. Nevertheless, he gamely lifts his glass and smiles at the male bartender, whose eyebrows are creeping dramatically towards his hairline.

His bartender returns with another, louder laugh, and serves another couple of customers before tucking her dishcloth back into her apron and returning to her place in front of Grantaire.

"I'm Eponine," she says. "It's an honour to meet you, living proof that our DJ isn't a robot after all."

He peers at her over the rim of the glass, unsure if he's being made fun of. "And I'm Grantaire. I'll understand if you want to accuse me of lying, by the way -- if I were the radiant DJ Enjolras, I'm sure I wouldn't sleep with me either. Well, first of all, I'd think twice before leaving LA to tour Oregon in the middle of winter. But if I did insist on such a visit, I'd aim a little higher when it came to one-night-stands. I'll have another, please. Less of the tonic, this time, and more of the elixir."

Eponine's mouth twitches. "You're talking a lot, Grantaire."

"I know. I don't know how flattered or insulted you should really be: a friend once told me I do this when I'm comfortable, but another one told me I do it when I'm _un_ comfortable."

"Well, how do you feel?"

"I'm trying _not_ to," Grantaire says, lifting his empty glass. "Behold, the means to this end. Better besozzled than besotted."

Eponine laughs, takes the glass back and proceeds to keeps the drinks coming steadily; he _likes_ Eponine.

He likes that she lets him stake a claim to that stool, discouraging anyone else who seems inclined to linger with a narrow flash of her dark eyes, and that she doesn't demand any more conversation from him while Enjolras plays out his set. He likes that she makes no attempt to shoo him out the door when she's wiping down glasses and someone with a broom is attacking the debris of sequins, bottles and winking dropped pennies on the dancefloor. In fact, he likes her right up until Enjolras himself leans over the bar and has a quick conversation with her that Grantaire, drunk enough not to react with any sort of speed and therefore drawing no attention to himself, doesn't catch much of.

Then --

"Oh, by the way." says Eponine, who is clearly a traitor and not someone he likes at _all_. "This is Grantaire. He's a big fan."

Even if he were sober, Grantaire doesn't think he'd be able to read anything in the way Enjolras looks at him now. There's a short silence that seems to turn elastic and stretch. Grantaire licks his lips and feels his mind go as blank as Enjolras' face.

"Hello," Enjolras says politely, and then there's another horrible eternity of nothing into which Grantaire manages, maybe, to smile, and then Enjolras drops his eyes and walks away.

Eponine makes a face at his retreating back. "I don't know what I expected."

"He probably doesn't remember," Grantaire says, into the dregs of his latest drink.

"I told you, he doesn't even tour very often, let alone have one-night-stands along the way."

Grantaire grits his teeth in something that feels even less like a smile than whatever he produced for Enjolras. "If you didn't know about me, what makes you think you'd know about the others?"

Eponine sighs. "Look, I know him. Not well, maybe, but I do know him. I'm just saying it doesn't seem in character. Combeferre --" indicating the other bartender "-- even thinks you should come back tomorrow, so the others don't think we invented you."

"Others?" Grantaire says warily. "I knew he had a posse. Or is this a cult?"

She pauses. "This is really bothering you, isn't it? Is it the idea that he might not remember, or the idea that you might actually have been special?"

"I don't like it when bartenders play psychologist," Grantaire snaps, but it comes out more plaintive than sharp. Fuck. This is pointless. Enjolras remembers or he doesn't; either way, he's made it clear how he wants the two of them to interact, and Grantaire isn't going to be the desperate, stalkerish object of anyone's scorn or pitying looks. Not here. He's starting over. "I don't want to presume anything," he adds, tight.

Eponine looks over at Enjolras. "A little presumption might be good for him."

"I don't want to -- I want another drink."

He doesn't think he'll actually get one. But Eponine's mouth softens where he was expecting it to harden, and she hooks his glass toward herself with a finger bent unprofessionally over the rim. Her nails are painted with a dark glitter that sparkles in every direction. 

"Christ, you're a mess," she says frankly, pouring a generous double measure of whisky and then pushing it back towards him. "Here. On the house."

"Why?" he asks, once it's safe in his hand.

Eponine pours herself one as well, just as large, and grabs some ice for her own glass with a savage poke of the tongs.

"Because it takes a mess to know a mess, I suppose," she says. "Cheers."

He lifts his drink and they touch their tumblers together, glass meeting glass with a delicate note.


	3. Chapter 3

Today the redheaded barista's badge reads _Chimmeny_ , but last week it read _Socrates_ so Grantaire knows better than to accept that at face value.

"Chim!" he says anyway, leaning on the counter. "My saviour, my love, my only hope."

She grins at him. "Better move quick if you're planning to stay, there's only one table left. Large mocha?"

"I don't suppose you've gained a liquor license in the last ten days? No? Large mocha it is, then."

Chimmeny flourishes a large, looping R onto the cup with a Sharpie and informs him in a conspiratorial whisper that tonight's live act is a serious cutie, and Grantaire should stick around if he knows what's good for him.

Grantaire, who has probably never known what's good for him -- or rather, if he's honest, tends to actively avoid it -- has been in LA for two months.

Two months down means two more months until Sophie and Marc get back from South Africa and Grantaire is officially homeless. Last week he played at a twenty-first party for the kind of people Rich Kids of Instagram was invented purely to mock; the birthday girl wore silver-glitter-laden heels to match the Winter Wonderland theme, and almost fell off them in fake surprise when her parents presented her with the keys to a Ferrari. When he thinks about it Grantaire is torn between a quiet, sickly sort of depressed outrage that he is never, ever telling Enjolras about, and deep gratitude for the ludicrous paycheck the girl's father was prepared to throw at them for a few hours' worth of Snow Patrol and Ke$ha covers.

He also walked away from that party with three unopened bottles of Moët that were left discarded on one of the snowflake-laden tables, and which he gifted to Les Amis' latest get-together. Absolutely, 100% worth it, both for Jehan's drunken rendition of Your Song -- accompanied by Feuilly on the _clarinet_ , for reasons known only to himself -- and for the look on Enjolras' face as Grantaire proposed a series of toasts to the capitalist hedonists without whom they would never be enjoying such bountiful and expensive booze.

The point is --

Well, the point is that Grantaire has become adept at pocketing sugar packets from McDonald's and using them to make his instant coffee taste less like liquid refuse. But once a week he's allowed to sit down at Café Lemblin and order one of their iced mochas, which are disgustingly expensive and even more disgustingly good. Grantaire discovered this via happy accident on his third day in the city, but word has spread as the temperature rises, and now on any given day the café is full of serious-faced food bloggers taking pictures of their drinks with their phones.

On a bad week, Grantaire can usually only hold out until Tuesday. He's never pretended to have much in the way of self-control, except that enforced by his wallet. But he's been sketching, these last few days. Not much, and the few pages he's filled have been uniformly _shit_ , but -- it's been something, it's helped. And so he's here for his weekly mocha on a Friday, just as the after-work crowds start to fill the streets. Friday evenings at Café Lemblin mean live music.

He lunges to secure the last table, which is jammed up between one wall and a drinks fridge, with barely enough room for him to pull the chair out to sit down. In the corner, a girl with a loose braid that makes her look very young is tuning a guitar. Brief, nervous bursts of chords spill out and stop, spill out and stop.

Grantaire takes a long gulp of his coffee. He's thinking of bribing Chimmeny -- possibly with sexual favours, teetering as he is on the perpetual edge of stone broke -- for a bottle of their chocolate syrup, so that he can start sneaking it into everyone's mugs at the ABC. He'd pay a lot of his hypothetical money to see Enjolras stop mid-rant because his coffee is --

And there he fucking goes again.

About twice a day Grantaire resolves to stop thinking about Enjolras so much; about five minutes after each resolution, he resigns himself to failure. They're -- friends, sort of? Probably not? They don't talk much, and when they do it usually devolves into the kind of quick, stinging argument that leaves Enjolras glaring and Grantaire more convinced than ever that Enjolras regrets having visited Portland in the first place.

Though now that he knows Enjolras a little better, it's true that doesn't seem the type to sleep with fans. He could still do it on his occasional tours, of course, but that implies a compartmentalisation, and Enjolras prides himself on -- let's face it -- being the change he wants to see in the world. You could take a knife to him and he'd bleed ideals.

Still, Grantaire would be surprised if anyone knew everything about Enjolras, even his two best friends, who bookend him with warning looks and easy smiles. Maybe he does carve a path of stringless sex with strangers across the continent, when the mood takes him to spread his message to other cities. Or maybe he _did_. Maybe Grantaire has single-handedly made Enjolras rethink his previous habit of casual hookups, just in case one of them turns up on his doorstep in a stalkerish fashion and infiltrates his life.

It was mostly an accident, the infiltration thing. Grantaire didn't go to the ABC expecting to acquire a handful of friends. But on his first morning in LA he woke up to the intruding glow of noon sunlight on his face, took one look at his unopened suitcases, and slouched out of the front door ten minutes later.

 _Where do I find the good coffee?_ he texted Eponine, who'd given him her number the previous night. Almost immediately he got back, _GOOD TIMING SHE JUST MADE A WHOLE POT, COME OVER RIGHT NOW AND BE OUR ENJOLRAS TURING TEST_ , which was how he found out that Eponine lives above the ABC, that she'd entered him in her phone as 'Unrobot', and also that Courfeyrac has a habit of answering other people's phones if they ding within his earshot.

He likes Courfeyrac, whose extroversion should make him annoying but instead manifests as a genuine, universal friendliness that's difficult to resist, even when he's decided that what Grantaire needs is a loud and cheerful conversation to take his mind off his latest hangover. Courfeyrac adopted Grantaire almost on sight, even if he did call him Unrobot for another two weeks.

The guitar chords from the corner are louder now, clashing more confidently with the ambient Joni Mitchell album that none of the café staff have bothered to pause yet. Grantaire watches the girl blow wisps of hair out of her face, one of her feet tapping a rapid, nervy beat against the crossbar of her stool. Her shoe falls off with the motion, and she makes a face as she fishes for it with her toes, sending a furtive glance around the room to see if anyone's noticed.

Grantaire manages just in time to direct his own gaze down to his phone, which obligingly chimes and announces a new text -- _We've got pizza!_ \-- from Joly.

Grantaire sends back: _At a show, thanks, might drop round later._

Joly was the second person who welcomed Grantaire, who didn't seem to mind that Grantaire's interest in the musical revolution was lukewarm at best, and whose face lit up when he heard that Grantaire played bass, because he knew a cover band whose bass player had just had a row with the drummer and huffed his way out of the band entirely. Joly knows enough to interpret _don't expect me_ from that text, because sometimes Grantaire needs to spend an evening alone with _New Miserable Experience_ looping on his iPod and a bottle of something cheap from the last-of-batch cart at the local booze shop. Or a mocha brimming with ice and rich syrup, and a live show by some tiny girl with red polka dots on her shoes and a name he's never heard of.

"Come on, guys, make her feel welcome!" says a gangly guy behind the mike. As applause jitters around the room he makes a joke out of how far down he has to adjust the stand.

The girl clears her throat and dimples at the microphone. "I, um, I like Urge For Going as much as the next person," she says, "but I don't think I want to compete?"

It takes a second for that to sink in, and then gangly-and-fedora'd makes flapping motions towards someone else, and Joni Mitchell falls silent.

"Thanks," the girl says. "So I'm Cosette, as you heard, and I'm going to play you some songs of mine and some songs by people who are much, much more famous than me. Here we go."

Going by appearances, Grantaire's half expecting something simple and sweet in the Dido line, perhaps with some obvious Sarah McLachlan influences thrown in. Cosette's high voice is sweet, certainly. But she liquifies it and then finds its bitterness on the beat, pours it like lime syrup around a guitar line so strongly strummed that it's almost harsh. She's trying to play for a whole band, Grantaire realises. A whole band and a handful of synthesisers are hiding in the ideal version of this song, and she's trying her best -- consciously or otherwise -- to bring them out. He likes the petulant, striving wistfulness of the sound that this creates.

Her breath control is for shit, and she slips on more than a few chords, but she's halfway through the first song before Grantaire finds his hand motionless around his wet glass and has to loosen his fingers and remember to drink.

She's just so _cute_ , sounding warmer and warmer in her breathless introductions to her songs -- including a fascinating cover of Diamonds & Rust, transfigured into something very different without Joan Baez's rich throb -- and looking nearly shy when she pulls a handful of demo CDs out of her bag and offers them for sale. What is she, sixteen? She's probably earning _lunch money_ with these things.

Grantaire ignores the whimper of fiscal realism that led to the 'one mocha per week' rule, and buys one. The girl is overbright with attention and her smile is focused somewhere many miles or years past his face, when she hands over the disc, but he doesn't take it personally. His skin is crawling with a dull envy of her uncomplicated joy in her own music and the hint that it might be popular, that it might take her somewhere.

He wishes, with a sweeping suddenness that might be either ugly or altruistic, that it wouldn't. That it doesn't. This desperately adolescent firefly happiness of hers, which can only be stifled. Obscurity would treat her better.

It's the first of her original songs that ends up stuck in his head. He spends an afternoon wandering the streets, passive and bored to despair as he sometimes gets, and loops her demo tracks through his earbuds. 

Then it's four a.m. and he's staring at the high ceiling of Sophie's guest bedroom and he's exhausted, dry-eyed, his mind a pale sheet of wakeful nonsense: scraps of poetry with built-in percussion, _there's a place I know where the birds swing low, and wayward vines go roaming_ , then his latest argument with Enjolras, _where the lilacs nod, and a marble god is pale, in scented gloaming_ , and then that song, over and over.

"I've got something for you," he says, the next day.

Enjolras is reading something on his laptop in the ABC's kitchen, and whatever it is is causing familiar furrows to appear in his brow. Maybe it's the new iTunes _Terms and Conditions_ ; if there ever were a person to actually read them, possibly while taking irate notes, it's Enjolras. Near his elbow is a mug that's full but not even a little bit steaming, most likely made two hours ago and then forgotten.

He fumbles the CD case that Grantaire tosses at his chest, but manages not to drop it, and looks down at the home-printed cover. At least the girl Cosette had the good sense not to over-Photoshop the thing; it's just a side angle of her face, and some basic block text.

"I've never heard of her," Enjolras says.

"No, this particular chanteuse isn't exactly on the public radar. But you like that sort of thing, don't you? The fresh-faced voice of undiscovered Art; think Lisa Loeb with some of the pop stripped away, or Nina Persson's solo stuff. Did you know they're still touring, the Cardigans? Anyway, I thought you might do something with it. Or not. I think she's probably burning the things on her home computer once she's done with her English homework, though, so it's a limited edition. I'll have it back if you're not interested."

Enjolras turns the CD in his hands and looks at Grantaire as though he's waiting for a punchline. "Thank you. I appreciate the thought." A pause, and then he adds, "I must admit I never saw the appeal as far as the Cardigans are concerned."

"No, of course not." Grantaire feels abruptly tired. "They're hardly a shining beacon of political thought, are they? _I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer_."

"I need -- what are you talking about?"

"Nothing," Grantaire says, drawling out the syllables. " _Bad dog, down, roll over_. No? Forget it."

Enjolras makes a frustrated noise. "I've never said that music _must_ be political, merely that an awareness of the sociopolitical structure in which it exists and is created --"

"For fuck's sake, then why _music_ at all? You care about the big picture -- all right, then why stop with the music industry? Why not go bigger? Why aren't you concentrating on marriage equality, or immigration policy, or the impact of new media on privacy laws? Why not the basic principle of democratic government? God knows you've got enough zeal for all of it, and your rants could use the new material."

There's a strange look on Enjolras' face, a tightness around his eyes. Grantaire realises, with an uneasy ripple of his stomach, that this is the first time he's been alone with Enjolras since he moved to LA. He resists the urge to scrub at his hair or look down to find out what sloppy combination of clothing passed the sniff-and-don test this morning.

"Was that a legitimate question?" Enjolras asks finally. "If you're bored and looking for easy entertainment, Grantaire, if you just want to waste my time --"

"I get it. You've got things to do, the corrupt capitalist construct to denounce. You're much too busy for the likes of me."

"Wait." Enjolras' voice is like the whip of fishing line over the water, catching Grantaire's shoulder where he was turning to leave and hooking him back around. " _Was_ it a legitimate question?"

"Sure. Why not."

Enjolras' shoulders are as tight as his face, held high and hunched. As Grantaire watches, everything about him eases, infinitesimally, like the slow thaw of a glacier. He even extends a long leg and pushes out the chair opposite his own place at the table.

With a feeling like the universe is wearing odd socks, Grantaire sits.

When Enjolras gazes at his laptop and doesn't say anything for a while, Grantaire pulls the cool mug of coffee towards himself and takes a cautious sip. Cold and made with milk probably just the safe side of souring, it's awful. It's still better than what he's got at home.

"There is a long history of art as subversive subculture," Enjolras says, and with a flicker of irritation Grantaire realises that Enjolras has been composing an essay in his head. "Of art as drawing-point for popular outcry, and a means for the people to speak out about their issues through the medium of entertainment. That's why the physical space of the club is important: because it allows for speech, for communication, and a way to bring people together in pursuit of ideas. I wanted the club to be a deliberate echo of places like CBGB, where the focus was on art for art's sake, and creativity above all else, without the trappings of economics."

"Thus: ABC," Grantaire surmises. Enjolras spares him a nod and carries on.

"Music is important not only for its own sake, but because it engages people more than pure politics will in this day and age. Society is jaded, and young people are cynical about the possibility of change." He flicks his eyes up at Grantaire with an emphasis that borders on hostility. "They will walk past protests on the street, and they satisfy their lukewarm need for social justice by clicking a button on Facebook. Music _energises_. It gives them a focus for belief."

The combination of passion and that deliberate, formal speech-making in Enjolras' voice is making Grantaire restless. He wants to lick the rhetoric out of the man's mouth and see what remains. The softening of Enjolras' posture has left him slumped back against the chair with a gap between his legs where Grantaire could crawl, could unzip Enjolras' fly and swallow him all the way down and see if he manages such fluent philosophy _then._

He can see it, practically feel it, with a hot taste in his mouth like burning cinnamon: Enjolras with one hand tangled in his hair and the other making vehement gestures, Enjolras' cock gliding in jerks over his tongue, Enjolras' breath catching as he tries to quote his favourite thinkers and _can't_ , can't do anything but tighten his fingers and shove Grantaire further down.

Grantaire's nailbeds are white, gripping the table's edge, and Enjolras is still talking.

"You are right," Enjolras says, and the shock of that is enough to banish the last pulse-racing cobwebs and anchor Grantaire in reality. "There are larger battles. But there is so much to be fought for here, in this sphere, for musicians whose messages and artistic visions are being drowned out by the crushing force of an industry that cares only for what will sell, and what is safe."

The thing is, Grantaire would agree with some of that. Not that he's got any hope of bringing about real change, because the world doesn't work that way, but that there's something to be fought for? Sure.

But there's something missing, here, in this speech like a gorgeous melody layered over no rhythm section at all.

"Do you love music?"

Enjolras blinks. Doesn't answer. Clearly, that wasn't part of the essay.

"It's a simple question," Grantaire says. "Do you care about why music might matter to an individual, the way it can make them feel? _Does_ it make you -- you, not the People or the Cynical Hordes -- feel anything? Do you even -- do you _love_ it? Yes or no."

Enjolras looks at his laptop screen.

"I understand music," Enjolras says.

"Yeah, okay, that's _not_ the same thing."

"And it would be disingenuous to pretend that I haven't a significant talent for it." He frowns, once again looking at Grantaire like Grantaire is a stand-in for all disaffected youth, all that's wrong in the world. "What else should I be doing with that talent, if not advancing the causes that I believe in?"

His shoulders are up again, his whole body a steel model of perfection that seems to berate Grantaire for even daring to imagine that it could be an object of pleasure, for all that he knows -- he _knows_ \-- otherwise.

This was a bad idea. All of it. Baiting Enjolras isn't as enjoyable as usual, because when Grantaire can bring himself to care about anything, it's this, the music that has woven itself into the best and the worst aspects of his life and coloured every part of it. This artform that Enjolras has mastered, and mastered brilliantly, without allowing for any emotional connection beyond its use as political tool.

The table between them could be miles wide. Grantaire peels his fingers off the edge and stands.

Instead of the sweet-voiced girl it's the Cardigans in Grantaire's head now. Rocking and mocking. _I'm wasting my life, you're changing the world._

"Wasting your life, I suppose," he says, hearing the roughness of his voice and hating it. "Like the rest of us."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem stuck in Grantaire's head is 'Song in a Minor Key' by Dorothy Parker; the Cardigans song really is called 'I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer' because sometimes the universe just drops these things into your lap.


	4. Chapter 4

"What," says Musichetta, "are _you_ doing here?"

Grantaire blinks up at her. He's surrounded by shopping bags and cardboard boxes, from which all of his worldly belongings are threatening to spill.

He was almost asleep before she barged in to the living area. This couch is a million years old, but that just makes it extra squashy and sinkable, and he played a very late gig last night and then spent a few hours thinking about nothing in particular beyond how much he hated himself for not being able to get to fucking sleep, and then today he _moved house_ , so he's a kind of rarefied, fossilized tired.

"I live here," he says. "Wait. Do you -- did you not --"

"The fuck," says Musichetta, flatly.

Joly tumbles out from the main bedroom, a bit wild-eyed. "Oops," he says.

"Joly!" Grantaire waves. "So when I said, oh, are you sure Musichetta won't mind, and you said, I'm sure it'll be fine --"

"I thought Bossuet was telling her," says Joly.

Musichetta rolls her eyes and frowns down at the both of them from atop her burgundy-red heels. "And I assume Bossuet thought something similar about you, right?"

"Darling --" begins Joly, all earnestness.

"-- you've invited this drunk to move into _my room_ , and you forgot to tell me?" Musichetta demands, somehow making herself look even taller.

Grantaire closes his eyes and pretends that he's not there while Joly points out -- quite reasonably -- that Musichetta only uses the room to keep her spare clothes in for the weeknights when she stays over, and she's slept on the futon a grand total of twice. Musichetta ruthlessly steers the conversation back to the fact that her boyfriends have invited someone else to live with them without even consulting her on the subject, and somewhere in there Grantaire apparently manages to fall asleep, because then the daylight has gone and the room is lamplit, Bossuet's voice streaming unintelligibly from the kitchen, and Musichetta is curled up on the largest, rattiest armchair with a glass in her hand. Her shoes are off and the stockings on her feet are glossy, her carefully straightened hair gone rough. Light catches in the golden wisps and gives her a fuzzy halo.

When she notices Grantaire's eyes on her, she smiles. "Good evening."

"Gnfn," says Grantaire, then clears his throat and struggles to sit upright. Most of his bags and boxes are gone, and he can see the edge of one box through the door of the second bedroom, propped ajar. "Good evening?"

"I'm sorry about earlier. I'm not mad at _you_ , you know." She raises her voice and tilts her head back over the armchair's edge. "It's not your fault I'm dating a pair of morons."

Bossuet appears in the kitchen doorway long enough to clutch a hand to his apron in pretend agony and drop a sauce-wet wooden spoon in the process. It clatters against the floor.

"See how she abuses us, R."

"You're lucky I'm here at all, you inconsiderate dolts," Musichetta shoots back, but fondness plays around her mouth. She sounds like a different person altogether, relaxed and warm.

Part of Grantaire has always envied Joly and Bossuet and their easiness together, the way their intimacy expands and contracts, concertina-like: one minute they're lost in shared jokes, so close you couldn't slide a credit card between them, and the next they're open and smiling at the whole room, creating a space for anyone at all to sit down and talk.

Sometimes this awakens Grantaire's lurking feeling of existing as skin stretched over a slow bleed, wondering how the hell it doesn't show on the surface. Wanting to be peeled back and seen, and also not wanting it at all. Sometimes he wants to snap at them like a dog at the door.

Most of the time, though, he finds them relaxing. They make no demands.

He looks at Musichetta with her arrogant shoes askew on the floor, new creases forming in her shirt where she's sprawled across the chair, and -- he can see how she fits, perhaps. He can see what she's doing here.

"Can I ask you a personal question?"

Musichetta looks at him for a while. "You can ask."

"Slap me down for poking at things that are none of my business, if you like, but did you know you were getting a package deal when you signed up? Or was it a surprise? Special, special, two for the price of one, this month only?"

She laughs. "They broke it to me gently. It took a few dates. Joly had to vet me, to make sure I was good enough for Bossuet." And, off Grantaire's blank expression: "That's how they work. You hadn't noticed?"

(He hadn't. But after that, knowing what to look for, he can see it: that Bossuet has no confidence in his own judgment where people are concerned, that Joly extends the first hand and rubs people down with his small anxieties, and Bossuet watches, trustful, awaiting a cue.)

Now he says, "And you're good enough, are you?"

Musichetta raises her glass to her mouth and her eyebrows to her hairline, both at the same time.

"Of course," she says, smiling with wine-wet lips, as though it's really that easy. As though it's possible to love someone and believe yourself deserving of their love at the same time.

"Of course," Grantaire echoes, hating her a little.

Not long after that, the romance novels start appearing. There were always one or two lurking in the apartment, propped in an unlikely manner next to Joly's histology textbooks and Bossuet's enormous Stephen King collection, but these new ones are left in the doorway to what is now Grantaire's room, and they're helpfully adorned with Post-It notes.

_Desire from a Distance_ features on its cover a young woman who bears as close a resemblance to Kate Middleton as the publishers thought they could get away with, and it seems to be about a working-class girl who longs hopelessly for a prince and then accidentally befriends him via an incident that might involve both crossdressing and poisoning plots. A scene that would probably be described as 'torrid' by the book's protagonist is bookmarked with a note that says, _Pining is a valid life choice!_

For all that she's a clinical pharmacist whose wardrobe consists largely of pencil skirts and a rainbow's worth of devastatingly crisp shirts, Musichetta has the handwriting of a seven-year-old girl. The little circles above each letter 'i' show signs of having evolved, under protest, from tiny hearts. He can't tell at all if the note is sarcastic or not.

Grantaire signs up for a library card for the first time in his life, and uses it to borrow something called _My Lady's Pleasure_ , in which the love triangle is resolved by the revelation that the heroine's two suitors have also been carrying on their own illicit affair, and they are definitely up for some acrobatic threesome arrangements.

First, Grantaire reads the book. _Desire from a Distance_ provided a good excuse for him not to talk to his bandmates at a wedding where he was hungover and twitchy and feeling particularly vicious about ostentatious ceremonies of lifelong commitment between two people who were statistically likely to divorce, or at least slowly implode into stalemate like his parents. Somehow, the book's cheerful fantasy helped. Nothing about it was gunning for realism.

This one is far less well written but the porn is shameless in a way that Grantaire appreciates. He slips it into Musichetta's bag the next time she stays over; his only Post-It says _my kingdom for a pair of noise cancelling headphones_ , and he makes sure it's stuck to the page where all three of the novel's participants come to a loud and impossibly simultaneous climax.

Musichetta counters with _One Night of Esctasy_ which is about a brief, mind-blowing affair that defines the course of a young ingenue's life and blah blah blah, Grantaire really needs to have a conversation with someone about how his past is now apparently common knowledge.

But first he visits three separate branches of the city library and finally locates _In the Chambers of Power_ , a novel about a confident politician who creatively seduces her way through a series of much younger men.

"Good choice," someone says.

Grantaire looks up to see a very Hollywood sort of specimen lounging with his feet up on one of the library's common tables, probably to show off the line of his jeans, which look like they cost more than Grantaire's car. This man pushes his aviators even further back on his head, nods at the book, and delivers a wink so filthy that Grantaire feels slightly violated.

"Right," he says, and edges towards the check-out machines.

The book, he vindictively leaves in Bossuet's sock drawer, next to the box of condoms.

Then he turns up to the ABC on a quietish Monday night, slaps a heavily Post-It-adorned copy of something called _Lady in Waiting_ onto the bar in front of Eponine and says, "See, this is what happens when you tell everyone that I'm in the throes of unrequited whatever."

" _I_ didn't tell anyone," Eponine says, and rolls her eyes in Combeferre's direction.

"Gossip, stemming forth from behind those straight laces? And straight -- well, everything? You astound me."

"You wouldn't think it, would you?" Eponine smiles. "But he'll pass on anything about Enjolras if he thinks Courfeyrac should know about it, and good luck keeping anything secret once Courfeyrac's gotten hold of it. You'll learn."

"All right, what about Musichetta?"

Eponine draws a flowchart on the bar using a small puddle of spilled liquid. "Usually? Courfeyrac -- Jehan -- Joly -- voilà. And what are you doing carrying this trash around anyway, R?" She picks up the book and opens it at random. " _Lord Marco's eyes burned into her, awakening memories of that night in the mist-drenched gardens, and her secret trembled on her tongue like the finest blancmange --_ "

"Hey, hey, fuck off." Grantaire grabs it out of her hands. "I'm not up to that part yet. And you're getting it sticky."

A customer waves for Eponine's attention; she raises a one-second finger at them and wipes the flowchart into a smear.

"Besides, it's not exactly hot gossip if your crush is obvious from a low planetary orbit to anyone with eyes," she says.

Which is -- true, but not Grantaire's fault. Nothing about Musichetta's game of dispensing advice via erotic fiction is helpful when it comes to Not Thinking About Enjolras.

"It's not like I'm in love with him," Grantaire says.

Eponine raises both of her eyebrows as she abandons him in favour of the customer, and Grantaire looks down at his glass of wine. Perhaps it's no emotion so noble as love, perhaps _romance_ is the wrong word entirely, but he can see in his life a story as concentric as anything published as one. He can reframe his life like that with no difficulty at all: everything falling into ripples around one meeting, all his subsequent choices and chances simply reaffirming its importance.

It's not, of course. Important. In the grand scheme of things, in the realm of great or even mundane romances, nobody's going to shell out for a single instance of casual sex followed by dreary, consuming, one-sided obsession. For this feeling like an eternal papercut on the side of his thumb.

The smart thing to do would be to create some distance. Hang out with his bandmates more, or meet some new people. Get another fucking _job_ , so he isn't existing on the vagaries of irregular gigs and the undeserved patience of Joly and Bossuet, who don't really need the rent money and so don't mind when it's a week late. And not, repeat _not_ , split his spare waking hours between loitering here in Enjolras' club, listening to Enjolras' music and tangling himself up in Enjolras' crew of idealists, and wandering the city's streets and libraries and galleries until the monologue is mean enough and fast enough that he reaches for something to slow it all down.

That would be the smart thing to do.

But Grantaire's fucked up almost everything he's tried his hand at, college included, and he's never pretended to be smart. He'll take whatever pleasures he can afford, from iced mocha on a guilty Tuesday to the strange, bright spark that flicks on inside him, easy as a light switch, whenever he sees Enjolras.

There's a day, a dozy-hot Sunday noon, when everyone has gathered to sit around tables and do -- something, _strategize_ \-- Grantaire's head is heavy and there's acid churning in his stomach, and he spends most of the time devoted to Combeferre's pointless agenda fishing ice cubes from Jehan's iced tea and gliding them over the backs of his hands, trying idly to place the crisp drumbeat and lyrics stuck in his head today. _Tell me all the things you would change / I don't pretend to know what you want._

His attention snaps back when Enjolras starts speaking. He's in a bad enough mood that he makes a point out of wiping his ice-wet hand on his jeans and pulling out his sketchbook, because he's never pretended to care about whatever legal travesty Enjolras' hush-hush contacts inside the big record labels have unearthed, and he's not going to start now.

The latest page isn't blank, the top two inches are dark with a badly smudged attempt to capture the fiddly design of Enjolras' everpresent bracelet, but good paper is expensive. It'll do.

Enjolras is standing with his back to the window, working anger into rhetoric. The sun is blinking painfully over his shoulder in such a way that Grantaire has to fish in his pocket for his sunglasses, feeling a stab of amusement that he transmutes into a deliberate smirk when Enjolras notices and narrows his eyes.

Grantaire, eyes shaded, grins back at him and then directs his attention down to the page.

It's hardly the first time he's tried to draw Enjolras, but he's usually confined himself to focused studies like the bracelet: the way Enjolras' hair looks when he's removed his headphones and not thought to smooth it down; the determined set of his jaw beneath his neutral mouth; the tired droop of his shoulders when he closes his laptop at the end of the night.

Now, Grantaire draws him head-to-toe, and adorns the easy outline with mischief born of the flash of that too-bright sun, the viciously hot spark of his own desire, and the embers of zeal that burn beneath Enjolras' voice even when he's preaching to his own choir. Grantaire ducks his eyes constantly up and down behind the safety of his glasses and sketches Enjolras as orator, as oracle. As the living embodiment of music.

Jehan, who had endured Grantaire's plundering of his drink with no more than an initial half-hearted protest, is the first to notice what he's doing. He makes a stifled noise that could be the prelude to either a laugh or a comment, but then settles down with his cheek pressed against Grantaire's shoulder, watching.

Grantaire adds a lyre.

Jehan's cheek twitches, and there's a scrape of chair on floor to their left as Bahorel moves in for a better view. Grantaire adds a few more rays of comedy sunlight and then returns to the faint sketch of Enjolras' face and starts to refine the lines.

Bahorel whispers something; Grantaire keeps going, forgetting the heat and the glare, not bothering to look up any more, coaxing Enjolras' image out of the page and out of his memory.

Gradually, he realises two things. The first is that after months of consistently failing to capture emotion in art he's managed something almost true, here, today, in the terse sweep of his pencil to create this mocking portrait.

The second is that Enjolras has stopped talking.

Grantaire clenches his teeth and deliberately adds another line, sharpening the corner of oracle-Enjolras' eyes. Then another, and another, creating a play of light in his hair.

"Very well," Enjolras says finally. "What are you doing that's so important, Grantaire?"

Grantaire could tear the page out and scrunch it up. He could slam the book closed and dare anyone to speak. Or just pick it up and leave.

But if the way he feels isn't a secret then it might as well be a joke, and Enjolras is standing there with his terrible fucking clothes and his firm stance, untouchable, always. Enjolras deserves this, to have it thrown in his face in public.

Grantaire blows showily to scatter tiny pieces of eraser, lifts the sketchbook and turns it around.

"As you can see, Apollo, you exist on a higher plane than us mere mortals, we who just like the way the music sounds. Tell us more about the glorious future you are shaping. Let us compose paeans to your glory."

Nobody's whispering now, though Grantaire can see Courfeyrac exchange a complicated glance with Combeferre. Enjolras has colour in his cheeks, his hands clenched into fists, gazing at the sketch. Seeing nothing but insult.

"This isn't about me, Grantaire," he says. "My fame, such as it is, is _not about me_."

Grantaire laughs. Drops the sketchbook onto the table, where it makes a quiet hollow noise.

"Honestly, how naive can you be?" he says. "Of course it's about you."

He feels hot and smarting for the rest of the day, and the feeling stays with him when he crawls out of bed just after noon on the next: a feeling like the topmost layer of his skin has begun to peel back, leaving him raw. The chances that anyone's going to try and talk to him about it are slim -- enforced emotional openness is _not_ a prominent feature of this odd, social-political group, for all that its friendships are close-knit to a remarkable degree -- but Grantaire feels like nursing his doomed idolatry somewhere where not even eye contact will be required of him. There's a bottle of wine in the apartment that's niggling at the back of his mind, a promise, but if he starts drinking this early in the afternoon the whole lot will be gone by the time of night when it'll do the most good. He's got a grand total of seventy dollars in his checking account and nine in his wallet. That bottle needs to last.

So he goes to the library. It's almost getting to be a habit at this point, and the branch on a bus route between the apartment and the ABC has a surprisingly good collection of sheet music. Grantaire sinks into a soft chair in the newspaper section, next to an elderly man with enormous glasses, and slips his earbuds in.

It's a weekday. The spectrum of humanity spending working hours here, in this free air-conditioned space, is distracting enough that he takes his sketchbook out of his bag and flips firmly past the Apollo picture.

A woman with tired eyes is trying to keep three small children from braining themselves on the table legs in the kids' section. Another woman with an orange awareness pin on her cardigan -- Grantaire's knowledge stops at pink for breast cancer, who knows what the hell _orange_ is for -- is speaking to herself, loudly enough to draw glances, as she browses a spinning rack of paperbacks. There's a table full of Asian students staring with varying degrees of attention at folders of notes, one of them shredding the label off his water bottle with repetitive picking motions. At the computers, a tiny woman with white hair and a walker decorated with holographic stickers is typing the world's slowest email, one determined finger-jab at a time.

Grantaire covers the back of Enjolras' portrait with smaller, rougher portraits. He's calmed down and is thinking about wine only once every few minutes when he starts to sketch the overlong sleeves and deadly cheekbones of a man strolling idly along one edge of the fiction shelves. Then he realises that it's the guy from last time, now sans aviators but sporting a ridiculous leather necklace.

Just as he comes to this realisation, the man starts walking in his direction. He meets Grantaire's eyes for a beat too long for this to be accidental, and even smiles as he does so. It's a lazy, self-satisfied sort of smile, and Grantaire wonders what he's doing here, with the mothers and pensioners and the people for whom leisure time is handcuffed unpleasantly to unemployment. He could be living off his looks, but this is Los Angeles; the actors aren't the ones earning enough money to lounge around dressed like that, unless they're famous. They're all off working two other jobs in between auditions.

Along with the cheekbones this guy has hair that's asymmetrical to the point of artistry, and is dressed in a way that makes him look more or less like the Korean version of Tilda Swinton. Despite the fact that he's mostly wearing a combination of expensive shades of black and grey, he still manages to give the impression of glitter.

"You come here a lot," the guy says when he's reached the newspaper table, as though that's still a line that real people use.

"I have a boyfriend," Grantaire lies automatically, then wonders if he shouldn't have been extra discouraging and said _girlfriend_. Or gone the easy route and pretended not to hear anything over his music.

"Please," the guy says; it's actually more like a scoff.

Before Grantaire can work out what the fuck that means, the guy drops a much-creased library paperback onto the nearest copy of the _L.A. Times_. Then he takes his cheekbones and his air of glittery boredom and wanders away.

It's a romance novel. It looks dreadful.

Grantaire, after scrawling WHAT THE HELL in pissed-off letters over the top of his aborted sketch of Cheekbones, borrows it anyway.

It's raining when he leaves the library, one of those short unseasonal storms that gurgle furiously out of a still-bright sky and pass within the hour. Grantaire's TAP card manages to get wet in the short space between his pocket and him stepping aboard the bus.

He heads back to the ABC, because the club's _every night of the week_ policy means that most socialising happens in the early evening, and someone usually scrapes some sort of food together. If he's lucky, Grantaire can get away with only having to pay for two of his day's three meals, and seventy dollars can go a long way if one of those meals is ramen and you tend to sleep through breakfast anyway. Besides, he can probably wheedle a drink out of Eponine.

Grantaire enters the break room, shaking rain from his hair and feeling refreshed and tentatively cheerful, and goes immediately to steal a handful of cheese balls from beneath Bahorel's arm. Looks like they've defaulted to snack food for dinner again.

That pathetic part of him that always finds Enjolras in a room, even before it starts cataloguing the free food, has informed him that the ABC's fearless leader is leaning against a wall, frowning vaguely, listening to something through his headphones. He does this a lot, especially if he feels that a night's playlist has been pulled together too quickly.

"R!" Bahorel says, turning to Grantaire. "Settle this for us."

"Oh, come on," protests Feuilly. "Grantaire'll always side with the rhythm section. That's not fair."

Grantaire fills his mouth with orange-dusted starch and watches Bahorel bash out some kind of complex combination on an invisible drum kit, while Feuilly tries to explain the tail end of an argument that's clearly been going on for almost an hour. Grantaire manages to bow out without having to incur anyone's enmity for preferring one time signature -- or possibly one obscure subgenre of ska, he's not sure -- over another. He sits at the table, where Combeferre is frowning down at a textbook with needle-eyed concentration and ignoring Joly's persistent request to tell him if he thinks this cut looks like it's getting infected, and does he think Joly could have a flexor sheath abscess?

"A what?" says Grantaire, and hastily covers this mistake with, "Do you think anyone will mind if I take the rest of that hummus?"

"Hmm? No, sure, take it. And you might as well take the carrot sticks, nobody's eating those. Sorry, Combeferre."

"Someone has to make sure we don't die of scurvy," says Combeferre, without lifting his eyes from the page.

Joly looks at the tiny cut on his finger with a whole new level of alarm. Combeferre gives a little twitch that Grantaire is ninety percent sure is due to Bossuet, seated opposite, treading on his foot under the table.

Grantaire hunts down the lid of the hummus and stows the tub in his bag, along with the foil-wrapped carrots and the fragmented remains of some tortilla chips.

"Are you planning a picnic?" Bossuet asks.

"Shame is for those with a regular salary," Grantaire returns, eyeing a half-empty bag of wasabi peas.

Joly leaves off inspecting his imaginary wounds, at that, and gives Grantaire a wide-eyed look. "R, if it's as bad as all that, you can have this week's --"

"As much as I appreciate your unending charity," Grantaire cuts in, landing on the last word with more sarcastic force than he'd planned, "I think if I get any further behind on the rent, you'll be legally required to evict me and turn my room back into Musichetta's walk-in closet."

Part of him is listening for Musichetta's interjection, but she doesn't come to many of these gatherings. Anyway, he remembers, she's out of town, grumpily acquiring some sort of professional development points at a conference in San Diego.

He assumes that Enjolras is paying attention to exactly none of this, but perhaps Grantaire isn't the only person who allows speech to intrude through music from time to time, because Enjolras pauses in front of Grantaire on his way down to prepare for the club's opening.

The break room is almost empty by this point. The only people left at the table are Joly, who has stolen Combeferre's textbook and is now scribbling an indecipherable diagram of arrows and words like _adrenal medulla_ on a legal pad, and Grantaire himself, now reading his library book with a kind of fascinated admiration. It's exactly the kind of confused genre pastiche that its cover implies, but for all that, the writer romps with glorious conviction through a story featuring a lady werewolf who falls in love with a merman. More importantly, nothing about it has any bearing on Grantaire's life whatsoever.

He looks up as soon as Enjolras begins to show signs of hovering.

"Can you paint?"

"What?"

"You can draw," Enjolras says, thankfully skimming right over the entire incident that led to this discovery. "I didn't know that. Do you paint, too?"

Grantaire closes his book but keeps a finger between the pages like a lifeline, uneasy. " _Do_ I paint and _can_ I paint are very different questions, though I suppose any number of modern art apologists would line up to disagree. Is there any particular reason for this sudden interest in my hobbies?"

Enjolras nods. "The walls of the club need retouching. It's been years."

"Look, I realise your talents lie in the audio rather than the visual arts, but surely even you must know that there's a difference between painting _pictures_ and applying layers of paint to walls --"

"I'll pay you, obviously," Enjolras says, and Grantaire closes his mouth. Enjolras looks stubborn. "You will probably have noticed that I like to employ my friends, where I can. Which is not to say that I treat these arrangements as informal; I can have Courfeyrac draw up a contract which would suffice --"

"Yes," Grantaire says. His tongue feels stupid, because Enjolras thinks they're friends. Or is prepared to pretend so for business purposes, whatever, Enjolras will _pay him_ , and Grantaire isn't stupid enough to think that this has nothing to do with his current state of blatant destitution. But where this kind of offer might come across as insulting or patronising from someone else, from Enjolras it seems -- frank. No more and no less than an exchange of necessary things. "Yes, I'll do it, I'll paint your walls. Are you sure you just want a retouch?"

Enjolras gives him the unconcernedly impatient look of someone for whom visual aesthetics have hardly ever been worth a second thought. You have to have either implausible morality or significant personal beauty to develop that kind of obliviousness, Grantaire thinks, and of fucking _course_ Enjolras has both. It explains a few things about his dress sense.

"Can I change them?" Grantaire presses.

"You can if you want." Enjolras shrugs. "Keep the receipts for everything, I'll reimburse you."

"Are you sure about that? You might regret such a rash offer when I get paint all over your furnishings. Or pick a shade of lime green that sends all of your patrons fleeing into the night."

"Grantaire, I'm sure you'll do a perfectly good job," Enjolras says.

He means _stop kidding around_ , it's a small and ridiculous thing, but it makes something in Grantaire crack like fresh honeycomb and drip warmth right through him, an aching tenderness for this man who believes in such patently hopeless causes -- Grantaire included -- with such bright, effortful constancy. Anyone who would call Enjolras' idealism easy hasn't seen the energy he puts into maintaining it, the focus it takes for him to remain clear-eyed and unflagging in his pursuit of a world that's _better_. Grantaire would argue with him for a week just to glory in the height of his flame. Grantaire would argue with him for years.

It crashes into him that what he feels for Enjolras is no longer a crush, or even lust with a double measure of idolatry. If it ever was that simple. This desire has grown beyond its assumed bounds and begun to glow, like pale sticker-stars on a child's ceiling, absorbing the daylight and then filling the following dark.

He wants to punch something. Or drink a lot of somethings. Or -- do something really big, and really absurd.

At least he recognises displacement when he sees it.

"I do have a few ideas," he says.

"They're just walls," says Enjolras.

Grantaire looks at him and that glowing, needy pain wrings his chest like a wet cloth.

"A complete failure of imagination, Apollo," he says. "As per usual."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lyrics that Grantaire is attempting to attribute are from 'Distant Sun' by Crowded House.


	5. Chapter 5

Grantaire realises halfway down the first paint aisle of Home Depot that the small basket-on-wheels is not going to be large enough. He doubles back and transfers everything into a large shopping cart, which he pushes up and down the aisles, collecting every colour that takes his fancy, until it's filled with enough paint to cover a stadium.

At one point, someone in the bright orange apron of the store employees sidles up in his peripheral vision.

"Do you need help with anything?"

"Oh, I need help," Grantaire says, rocking on his toes as he tries to decide between Coolest Peppermint and Pale Verdigris. "So much help. Help is exactly what I need."

"Well, that's what I'm here for."

To his credit, the man sounds completely sincere. Grantaire, who was pathologically incapable of offering assistance without sounding sarcastic during his own forays into retail work, glances at him in admiration.

"How are you with lost causes? I mean, really, total disasters."

"Tell me the problem, and I'll see what I can do. I'm Alan," the man says, extending his hand. "With an I."

" _...where_?" Grantaire asks, fascinated.

Alain -- apparently -- doesn't have much to offer on the subject of hopeless sexual crises which have recently and horrifyingly developed into hopeless _romantic_ crises, but he is very knowledgeable about repainting interiors. Grantaire's vague intention to just slosh a dark colour over the existing paint job in order to create a base somehow transforms into the purchase of three pole sanders and several tubs of tinted primer.

An hour later he's feeling mildly dizzy, though he's not sure if that's paint fumes or hypoglycemia, and is engaged in an involved discussion about topcoats with Alain and a woman with a shaved head, a tattoo sleeve and bright red lipstick. The woman has the glum and alarmed expression of someone who rashly volunteered to build a fence and small gazebo in the middle of summer, and is now wondering if a huge bunch of flowers and an expensive mini-break in Santa Barbara mightn't have been a better apology gift.

"What's all this for, anyway?" she asks, eyeing Grantaire's cart with blatant fellow-feeling.

Grantaire can't muster the energy to be offended, because he knows he is _exactly_ the kind of person whose romantic fuck-ups would be of a scale requiring industrial levels of home improvement. The fact that there is no romance to be maintained here just makes it even more pathetic.

"A mural based on the aesthetic of CBGB," he says.

She clearly doesn't recognise the name, but she reaches out and pats him heavily on the shoulder anyway. "Good luck," she says, and wanders off with her own cart towards the lumber section.

"Here," Alain says, hoisting the pole sanders. "I'll give you a hand taking all of this to the checkout."

True to his word, Enjolras has Courfeyrac draw up a formal freelancing contract, which Grantaire doesn't bother to read, just signs and hands it back.

Courfeyrac grins and tucks it into a folder. "I'm excited about this," he says. "Closing the club for four days? You're forcing him to take a vacation."

"That's not," Enjolras starts, at the same time as Grantaire saying, "Vacation? _Enjolras_?"

Courfeyrac makes a face. "In a manner of speaking."

"I'm going on a short tour," Enjolras says firmly. "I haven't done that in over a year, and there are a few clubs in San Francisco who have expressed an interest."

"You mean, who seem to have hired interns whose only job is to email the Cafe Musain address begging for you to come and do some guest sets," Courfeyrac says.

"You don't want to get out of California?" Grantaire says. "Portland barely gets above eighty, this time of year."

Courfeyrac's eyes widen.

"I hadn't thought about it," Enjolras says.

Part of Grantaire's brain is shouting _no, no, we don't mention Portland_ , but fuck it, in for a penny.

"Plus there's plenty of things to do in the time that you don't spend disseminating your noble message in front of gyrating crowds. Not that Portland is one of those cities that never sleep, but then, not-sleeping can be entertainment in and of itself, even if it does defeat the purpose of escaping the heat. I'm sure _you'd_ have no trouble finding a tour guide that's both willing and agile. I mean able. Right?"

Enjolras looks at him, nothing peeking through the cool neutrality of his face, and Grantaire is rocketed back in time to his very first night at the ABC, six months ago. Grantaire is almost certain, now, that Enjolras _does_ remember. Almost. But nevertheless, We Don't Mention Portland: that's the silent agreement, no toes trodden upon, nobody given a chance to speak their regret aloud.

"I am not entirely incapable of learning from past mistakes," Enjolras says stiffly.

Courfeyrac's eyes go from horrified-wide to horrified-screwed-shut. Grantaire pays attention to that because it's easier than paying attention to the way his own face burns and his throat closes around ugly, acidic pain. Pain, but no surprise.

He swallows, twice, and banishes the whole incident to the simmering internal swamp that belches up bubbles of negativity and self-loathing whenever Grantaire's trying to fall asleep. Obviously this one will be presented for his perusal many, many, many times.

"Courfeyrac," Grantaire says.

One eye cracks open. Then the other. "Yes?"

"Can you rope in some more people to help, on the first day? I won't be able to prep the walls on my own."

"Sure," Courfeyrac says, slowly. "I can organise that."

"Grantaire," Enjolras says, frowning.

"Thanks," Grantaire says to Courfeyrac, and turns on his heel before he can do something even more radiantly _stupid,_ like step right up into Enjolras' personal space and throw a full, needy, pointless tantrum along the lines of: I'd kind of figured you wish you'd never fucked me, thanks, but was the confirmation really necessary?

Why the hell did he _push_ , fuck, you'd think he'd be able to get through a single doomed emotional epiphany without prodding the fire with his bare hands and inflicting _more_ damage on himself, but no. He's not that kind of person.

Grantaire has even money on the entire group knowing the full details of his humiliation by the time they all turn up to help, but it seems like Courfeyrac's surprising ability to keep secrets is reasserting itself, because Grantaire can't detect any new edges of pity or wariness in the way they all treat him. And he's very good at detecting those.

"What do you have planned?" Musichetta asks, eyeing the stack of paint tins.

"I have no idea," Grantaire lies. He doesn't want to discuss it yet. Discussion might pop the developing bubble of images in his head. "I guess I'll work it out as I go."

Musichetta's hair is recently cropped short, and the blonde bangs of it are stuck to her skin with sweat. She wipes her arm across her forehead and stares longingly across the room at where her partners, having finished sanding their assigned section, are now squeezing water down one another's necks with the sponges they used to wash down the walls.

It's really fucking hot. Grantaire is half humbled and half bemused that he has this many friends who will turn up at the drop of a hat, in the middle of summer, to do unpaid physical labour. It's not like none of them have _jobs_ , either. He probably owes everyone present at least three meals, none of which he can afford.

"Don't think about it like that," says Combeferre, when Grantaire -- only partly joking -- mentions this. "Enjolras has done a lot for everyone here."

Grantaire sits on the edge of the stage, swigging lukewarm water from a bottle, and considers this. He wouldn't put it past Combeferre to say it deliberately, to make Grantaire feel less beholden, but there's something of a festival air about the day, despite the loud complaints about the heat: Les Amis banded together towards a common goal that's not noble, not high-minded, but _affectionate_ , something concrete and achievable, something that will make their absent leader happy.

The sanding completed, they wash the walls a second time. Grantaire consults the piece of paper foisted upon him by Alain-with-an-I.

"They have to be absolutely dry before the primer goes on," he says. "So the only important question is, who knows any good bars in the area that aren't this one?"

Fewer hands are needed the next day, so in the end it's just Jehan and Courfeyrac downing huge cups of iced coffee and hoisting rollers, helping Grantaire to lay down on the prepared walls the dark-tinted primer that will serve as the mural's base. Grantaire's arms are aching by the end of it, and Eponine gives him a warm lavender pack to lay over his shoulders as well as feeding him dinner. Grantaire does the dishes and sets Gavroche up with a long playlist of YouTube clips to begin his much-needed education in the Lovely Ladies and other stars of pop-grunge, then pours himself a triple whiskey and sketches until he can't stop yawning.

Day three of the great paint job falls on a Saturday, and Grantaire rolls off Eponine's couch at an hour of the morning he usually tries to avoid existing in while conscious. He's drawn scaling grids onto the walls, and is arranging his mass of paint tins into a palette of sorts on the plastic-sheeted floor, when Eponine herself appears at the door leading through into the kitchen behind the bar.

Grantaire sits back on his heels, uncertain.

"Far be it from me to turn down a pair of helping hands, let alone hands as adept at mixing liquids as yours. But I wasn't expecting company for this part. There may even be a clause in the contract saying I now owe you a percentage of my earnings simply for stepping through the door; we'd have to ask Courfeyrac about that."

"I brought supplies," is all Eponine says. She lifts a plastic shopping bag in one hand and a promisingly bottle-shaped parcel in the other. "Jehan's taken my brother off my hands for the day, so I thought I'd use the piano. Do you mind?"

Grantaire waves a hand. "The stage is yours. Literally."

"Correct response. Croissants and smoothie for _you_ ," Eponine says, flashing a smile as she crosses the club floor and climbs the steps to the stage.

"Jehan took Gavroche for a whole day?" Grantaire says. "Voluntarily?"

Eponine pauses in pulling the cover off the keyboard to flip Grantaire off, but he can tell it's a token gesture.

"I've been assured they're going to the LACMA, out for burritos, and then to a movie rated no higher than PG," she says. "I'd like to see the Department of Child Protection Services take exception to _that_."

Grantaire ducks his eyes from the bitterness in her voice and mixes some white into his puddle of Cornflower Blue.

"The man who drags Gavroche around a museum is a far, far braver man than I," he says. "Not that that's a difficult category to qualify for."

"Apparently, there's an exhibit on the history of Japanese animation. Jehan promised giant robots."

Eponine starts with scales and dutiful arpeggios and then segues into slow jazz as Grantaire gets to work. He starts off with the Warhol mashup, soup cans adorned with a Marilyn blob of hair. For the next one he has to bring up a Coolidge image for reference on his phone as well as his initial sketch, but he breaks out all the primary colours that he threw into his Home Depot cart and does the Beatles playing poker beneath a triangular light, cards and sheet music scattered across the green baize.

Grantaire sits back from this painting, breathing hard and sweating into his eyes, and his brain tunes back in to Eponine's music for the first time in over an hour. He doesn't recognise the melody. Her voice fills certain bars with words and fades thoughtfully away in others, in a way that suggest she's doing exactly what he's doing right now: creating. Inventing. It's gorgeous, unpredictable, and Grantaire's mind hooks in and follows the lyrics.

She moves with barely a breath from that song, whatever it was, into a slow and thoughtful version of April Come She Will. Grantaire hums an absent harmony that breaks into full song before he's really thinking about it.

Eponine falls silent and lets him sing another few lines solo, and then the piano cuts off abruptly. Grantaire, obedient to accompaniment, stops as well.

"Seriously?" Eponine says.

"You know me, I try not to do anything seriously," Grantaire says, on autopilot. He can't decide between Debbie Harry and Amy Winehouse for his Mona Lisa. "Oh, I'll stop singing, if that's what you mean. Sorry. Please, continue with voice unadulterated."

" _Stop_ singing?" Eponine says, exasperated now. "I only just got you to _start_. Why didn't I know you could sing?"

"I feel like I've had this discussion recently, only the first time around it was about painting." Grantaire turns and brandishes his brush at her. "Anyone can sing. But I take it you mean something more complimentary."

"Grantaire, you're really good," she says.

There's this about the unimpressed attitude Eponine seems to bring to most of her life: it makes it difficult to shrug off her praise. Grantaire's shoulders feel itchy with the urge to do so, but...it wants to stick. He rubs at his face with the side of his hand, instead.

"I'm not as good as you," he says, which is so true as to be totally unarguable.

Eponine plays a precise chord that manages, somehow, to sound scornful. Grantaire turns back to the wall.

Actually, he wants to use Gwen Stefani as his Mona Lisa, but the last time he requested Don't Speak as part of a club setlist it led to Enjolras snapping back at him with a scathing criticism of No Doubt that segued into one of his ridiculous diatribes against the music of the nineties in general.

The contrary streak in Grantaire is tempted to use Stefani anyway. But this is Enjolras' club, Enjolras' money buying the paint and paying Grantaire for his time, and Grantaire isn't so good at lying to himself that he can pretend he's indifferent to what Enjolras will think of the end result.

Debbie Harry it is.

"What?" Eponine says, when she glances up from the piano to find him hovering nearby. "What are you doing?"

"Using your eyes for reference," he says.

"Creep," Eponine says, with a flick of her hair.

But she keeps her profile in the good light while he works, and the idea for the next painting comes to him between one graceful curl of her hand over a chord and the next.

He sketches it quickly, before the image can disappear, and rules a grid over the sketch before deciding where to place it on the walls. It would look good next to the actually-gothic (and really, closer to emo) American Gothic, for contrast. He works for longer than he can really afford on the facial expression, giving his painted Eponine a wistful, serious look, at something unseen, as she plays. He adds flowers in her hair and strewn over the piano keys.

WITH THANKS TO JANMOT he splashes over the bottom of it.

Eponine is murmuring her way through Famous Blue Raincoat, _I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you_ , her hands twitching up and down the octaves and adding extra pieces of melody here and there. If she notices, she doesn't say anything.

The largest part of the mural, Grantaire leaves for last. He had this picture in his head long before Enjolras asked him to do this; there's a preliminary version of it tucked away in a sketchbook, where it spilled out half-sincere and half-mocking from his pencil during a meeting, but the idea itself is even older. We Don't Mention Portland, but we sure do think about it, and Grantaire remembers even what he was babbling in the moment before Enjolras kissed him.

Liberty has a mohawk and piercings, Liberty is leading an army of punks, but Liberty's flag remains red. On it Grantaire carefully shapes the letters ABC in that gaudy, circusesque CBGB font.

When he drops his arm, his shoulder hurts like he's passed out at a bad angle and slept on it all night, and Eponine is standing nearby. The bag of food is in her hands but she's looking at the painting.

"R," she says.

"Oh, didn't I tell you?" There's a taste in Grantaire's mouth like sun-warmed metal. "Apparently it is love, after all. Don't worry. I'm sure it's not contagious."

Eponine is silent, then rests one hand at the junction of his shoulder and neck and squeezes, almost too hard. The pain is good.

The croissants disappeared long ago, but Eponine's bag also contains sandwiches. The bread's a bit dry but it could be sawdust for all Grantaire cares. He's heady with tiredness and the steady burn of pleasure that comes with art when it's going well. He'd almost forgotten what it was like.

They're partway into the bottle of Canadian Club when Jehan drops off a tired and talkative Gavroche, and Eponine stretches cramps out of her fingers and bids Grantaire goodnight in a voice gone rough around the edges, warmed and burred by liquor and ceaseless song.

With the rest of the bottle for company, Grantaire keeps painting late, late into the night, forcing himself not to overthink, to simply finish the fine detail of a section and move on to the next. A pressure is building in his gut, like if this is unfinished when he leaves the space, it will never be completed at all. He just has to push through. Be done.

He doesn't remember much of the next day beyond waking in a glaring patch of almost-noon sunlight on Eponine's couch, stumbling into the club and covering everything with a sealant coat, and stumbling back to the couch. When he wakes again there's a familiar ache in his stomach that means he should probably eat something, but he's used to ignoring that. It's nearly eight at night, by his phone. Enjolras comes back tomorrow.

Grantaire sticks his head under the kitchen tap, shakes water all over the metal of the sink, and then goes back into the main club.

He stands where Enjolras would usually stand, in the booth, behind the decks. He dims the lights and looks out into the empty space. It takes a while, almost a full minute, before he can bring himself to focus properly on the walls.

Something really big and really absurd. Well. There it is.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. Bousset. _u coming back 2nite? M made pasta._

He sends back, _just leaving now_.

Musichetta aggressively carbonaras him into a carbohydrate coma, which is one of the best side effects of having her stay over more frequently, and the next morning he almost feels like he's caught up on his sleep.

 _fearless leader has returned_ , Eponine texts him, and Grantaire spends a few paralysed moments with a piece of toast half in and half out of his mouth, discovering that he has the powerful urge to go and throw himself in the ocean instead of being present while Enjolras is looking at his handiwork for the first time.

Eponine's next text is, _don't be a pussy R get over here_

Musichetta, who has been shamelessly peering at Grantaire's phone in between gulping coffee and packing leftover pasta for her lunch, grabs it out of his hands.

 _sexist language!!_ she sends back.

"Hey," Grantaire protests. "And also, may I point out the number of books that you own with the words _Trollop_ or _Whore_ in the title."

"She's right, though," Musichetta says. "You almost killed yourself getting this done, we all almost got heatstroke helping you, now go and accept your accolades."

Grantaire's not exactly expecting anything as fancy as _accolades_. If he's honest, part of him's expecting to turn up to the ABC and find that there's nothing on the walls at all. He's had worse dreams.

But the paintings are there: not as good as they should be, to Grantaire's doubtful eye in the daylight, but there. And Enjolras is there too, standing in the centre of the club like the sun calmly awaiting the orbit of the solar system.

San Francisco must have been full of gorgeous young things panting to get their hands all over DJ Enjolras. Does he look different? _Would_ he look different? Staring at him gives Grantaire a second headache on top of his existing headache, trying to fit the double image of morning-afters together: Enjolras now, looking as unbothered as usual by the heat, and Enjolras as he looked in Portland, asleep, before Grantaire snuck out of the hotel. There are no red marks on now-Enjolras' neck, not that Grantaire was expecting marks, not that he was expecting _anything_ , but he was the one who was stupid enough to tell Enjolras to go and fuck a groupie, wasn't he?

"Grantaire," Enjolras says.

It probably means _stop staring_ , but Enjolras never outright says that, so Grantaire never does. Enjolras is turning in a slow circle, absorbing one patch of wall before he moves on to the next. He doesn't say anything more for a long time.

Grantaire says, "I wanted you to see it first."

"Mm," Enjolras says, barely vocalising at all.

Jesus, this is excruciating.

"This is what you get for employing a failed art student instead of an actual tradesman. If it's any consolation, this charitable act of yours has contradicted all sorts of statements made by all sorts of people, myself included, about how an art history degree was going to earn me no money, ever, in my lifetime."

Enjolras needs to say something soon, because Grantaire's never been any good at tolerating his silences.

Enjolras stares at the walls and says some more nothing.

Grantaire musters his most uncaring expression and shrugs. "Hey, well, give it a couple of weeks. If you really don't like it, I'll do something else."

"No!" Enjolras snaps. He blinks a few more times at Liberty and then looks sidelong at Grantaire, frowning. Just like usual. "I'm not paying you to redecorate the club every two weeks, Grantaire. If you're that desperate for income, why don't you tend bar with Eponine on Thursdays."

"Combeferre --"

"Combeferre shouldn't be sleeping through half of his Friday morning lectures," Enjolras says with evident satisfaction. "He doesn't have enough time for his studies as it is."

For once, nothing has lined up to bubble meaninglessly out of Grantaire's mouth. Enjolras looks about as approachable as Enjolras ever gets, with that ever-so-careful glacial loosening. His mouth is still sharp, as though he expects Grantaire to laugh in his face, and is prepared to close himself off again at a moment's notice.

At least five inappropriate Musichetta-induced scenarios involving haughty dukes with Secret Pain dance through Grantaire's head. He barely manages to avoid laughing, but he does grin.

"All right," he says, hoping it sounds like _thanks_. "But you're the one who has to tell him that, not me."

After all that, Grantaire utterly fails to be surprised when Enjolras is just as serious about employing him as a bartender as he was about the contract for painting the walls. There are piles of paperwork involved. Grantaire flicks through them and scrawls his signature on every likely-looking blank line, while Enjolras hovers and frowns and tells him that he should read it properly, or at least get someone to do it on his behalf.

("Hey, Bossuet, you went to law school, right?"

"Well, yeah, for like, _half a semester --_ "

"Great.")

And then --

"Is this some kind of cry for help?" Grantaire says, dropping the pile of membership forms onto Enjolras' keyboard.

The headphones are off, which means interruptions will technically be tolerated because Enjolras has either been bullied by Courfeyrac into checking and signing off on the ABC's accounts, or is writing angry blog posts, the former of which he hates and the latter of which he could do in his sleep. Headphones on means he's producing a new track, and the studio office could probably be sucked into a hell dimension and Enjolras would only notice when the screams of the damned started to intrude on the music. Even then, he'd probably record a few samples of crackling sulphur lakes to be looped over the bass and then march off and talk earnestly to the demons about their working conditions.

Speaking of.

"What are you talking about?" says Enjolras.

"This is very difficult for you, I see that now. You don't like being an employer because _spiritually_ you identify much more with the downtrodden employees of the world. You can feel the accusing eyes of Karl Marx's ghost on the back of your neck every time you sign a paycheck or have to rearrange a roster, can't you?"

For a moment he wonders if Enjolras is going to smile, or -- oh God -- look _sad_ , but the neutrality wins out.

"I don't see --"

"Enjolras, nobody needs to join three different unions."

" _Obviously_ ," says Enjolras, with the intense impatience that means he suspects Grantaire of misunderstanding his arguments on purpose. "You were supposed to just pick one. I was showing you that there are options. Did you even look at their membership manifestos?"

Grantaire wants so, so badly to muss Enjolras' hair. His whole forearm, the lines of his palm, his bitten-back fingernails itch with the desire to reach out and touch.

Time to leave.

"Here," he says, plucking the top one off the pile. "That'll do."

Part of him remembers an old, doomed resolution: get some distance. Branch out. Stop drawing circle after fucking circle with your life and stop putting this man at the centre ofthem. Certainly don't do anything stupid like, say, get an actual _job_ at his _club_. But that part of him has a voice that lives in a dark, sealed box, the box that Katy Perry meant when she sang about that house of cards, and it's difficult to hear at the best of times.

The rest of Grantaire looks at Enjolras and switches on, helpless and sure. It's the closest he has to happiness, and it'll win every time.

It's not like Grantaire _intends_ to start drinking more. But his brand of alcoholism has always been subject to the vagaries of availability, and prior to his employment at the ABC his guilt complex was large enough that rent and ramen and bass strings came out of his bank account before the next bottle of wine. Having friends behind the bar was one thing; working there is something else entirely. There's no shortage of grinning, drunk, sweat-slick boys and girls who want to buy a drink for the bartender. He likes the feeling of spirits spilling down his fingers from an overfull shot glass, he likes the insistent fizz of the soft drink tap, and he likes the way Eponine's laughter sounds in the empty club when she's wiping glasses and he's mopping down the bar, and they're taking sips of something top-shelf and lethal from Grantaire's new flask.

"I have to say, it's refreshing to see someone else having an argument with him. I feel less of an anomaly now. Although more anomaly than not, still, don't get me wrong."

"I don't know how _you_ can keep going back for more," Eponine says, setting a glass back into its tray with a vicious click.

"Hello, Grantaire speaking. I think we've already established that in this particular context I have all the self-preservation instinct of a bee in a hurricane."

"It's just -- the whole _point_ of the label is creative independence, I don't see why Enjolras has to keep harping on about _sampling_ and _genre_ when that's not the album I want to make. That's not the kind of music I write. Not that I'm producing much at all, right now," she adds grimly. "It's hard to settle into the songwriting groove when you have to maintain adequate employment hours and prove to the government that your brother isn't dying of scurvy or skipping school. They keep sending people over here because the Department of CPS isn't confident in my ability to raise a minor."

"I'll marry you," Grantaire says.

Eponine snorts. "Fuck off."

"No, really, it's perfect. We'll create a stable family unit. I'm such a fan _tas_ tic role model for a promising young man."

"Wow," Eponine says. "Romantic as that proposal is, you'll forgive me if I hold out for a better one."

Grantaire clutches at his breast, wounded by an invisible sword. "Are you saying you don't love me? You don't want to get a piece of all of...this?"

Eponine screws up her nose and shoves a dish cloth in his face, shooing him away from where he's looming in her space. "You should hold out too, Grantaire."

Wariness swims up through the layers of alcohol.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means," she says, steady, "stop going back for more."

Second verse, same as the -- well, by this time it's probably more like seventh verse, same as the first six, but still.

Some nights he makes it back to his own place to sleep; this isn't one of them. He blinks awake on the couch that's becoming a dear familiar friend -- ah, yes, he knows well that deep scratch in the arm of it, perfectly placed to scratch across his cheek! -- and unpeels his bare torso from the leather with a queasy sound like _shluup_. He was probably wearing a T-shirt when he fell asleep, but clearly at some point he overheated and woke up just enough to crawl out of it and fling it across the room. Fetching it back now seems like far too much effort. He's wearing trackpants. That'll do.

Grantaire's peripheral vision doesn't work amazingly well before the first coffee, alcoholic drink, or -- ideally -- combination of the two, and Enjolras has his largest headphones on and he's looking down at whatever his iPod is telling him, so they almost collide in the hallway.

"Grantaire," Enjolras says, too loud. He doesn't take his headphones off. His eyes are darting all over the place like he's trying to read a crowd.

Clearly Grantaire is failing to achieve basic standards of dress code for Enjolras' place of work and residence.

"I'm going to," Grantaire says, flapping a hand toward the kitchen in the universal signal, surely, for _make coffee and drink it until my hangover vibrates its way clean out of my body._

"Right," Enjolras says. His eyes pause for a manic second, somewhere on Grantaire's chest, and then swoop up to Grantaire's face.

Grantaire is not awake enough to process this. His brain tries anyway, for all of two seconds, and then collapses in a short-circuit of _cutting remark? ignore? flirt??_ and cries out pathetically for caffeine.

"Right," he says, and stumbles past.

Somewhere near the bottom of his first cup of coffee he clicks back online enough to regret not opting for door number three, no matter that flirting with Enjolras is about as useful as trying to tango with a brick wall. Grantaire groans, just for the satisfaction of the noise, and buries his head in his arms on the kitchen table.

He hears rather than sees Gavroche sit down nearby; it must be Gavroche, because Eponine doesn't scrape the chairs across the kitchen floor so that they make that particularly awful screeching sound.

"You slept over here again," Gavroche says, presently.

Grantaire moves his head in a way that might look like a nod.

Gavroche, the little shit, raises his already piercing voice. "Are you going to be sleeping over here a lot? Are you and my sister a _thing_ now? Because she's supposed to tell me if --"

"Fucking -- uh -- darn," Grantaire says. "I don't want to date your sister, you little asshole, now will you pipe _down_."

"You don't?"

"No."

"...why not?" Gavroche demands, now sounding even more peevish. "Ponine's awesome."

"Yeah, I know she is, but --"

" _Buuuuut,_ " Gavroche sings. "Buuuut, you like someone else, you want him to _change you like a remix_ \--"

"Ha ha ha, you are a fucking menace," Grantaire says into his arms, past caring about swearing in front of impressionable minors.

Gavroche gives a giggle. "I like you," he declares. "Will you buy me some cigarettes?"

" _No_." Grantaire looks up, aghast. "Your sister would slaughter me."

"Well, yeah," Gavroche says. He shrugs: no skin off _my_ back. "If she found out."

"Smoking'll ruin your voice," says Grantaire, and is surprised when this actually prompts a thoughtful frown onto Gavroche's face.

"Hey, monster," says Eponine, sticking her head in. "Is that homework done yet?"

"Yeah?" tries Gavroche.

"Nope," says Grantaire, out for revenge. He reaches out without looking and manages to mess up Gavroche's hair ("Quit it! I got _style_!") before nodding at Eponine. "I'll make sure it gets done."

"Yeah?" Gavroche glares at him. "Wha'do _you_ know about poems?"

Grantaire grins and gets up for more coffee. "Try me."

So that's that. He still doesn't know how much Eponine _likes_ him, but she puts up with his company on a regular basis and he's starting to suspect that it's more or less the same thing, with her. You're her people or you're not.

Or you're Marius, who stumbles into their lives (quite literally, in Courfeyrac's case) and attaches himself to Enjolras like a grateful puppy in a way that Grantaire has a fair amount of grudging sympathy for. In Marius' case, it stems from the fact that Enjolras shuns all music-related reality TV shows as _symptoms of the disease ravaging the industry_ , and so has no idea at all who Marius is at first.

It can't be denied that Marius is much better value than Grantaire. He listens to their discussions with a thoughtful expression, nods easily along to Enjolras' speeches, and -- best of all -- is a walking, talking, guitar-strumming Cause in a befreckled shell.

"Undeniable talent! Buying heedlessly into the promises of corrupt and manipulative television producers! Unfairly denied the opportunity to share his gifts due to inflexible contracts and personal tragedy! I'm surprised Enjolras hasn't started making a fucking documentary about him, he's perfect."

Eponine, usually a tolerant audience for this sort of thing, has her lips pressed together. "He's had a tough time of it recently, R," she says. "You can't deny that. And I don't think Enjolras is going to get very far with anything that'll draw attention to him, when he spends most of his time trying to keep his head down."

She's right. Marius has both a total disinterest in songwriting and a sweet but surprisingly steely determination not to be turned into a figurehead or a project. You can't help liking him.

"Though if I had to live with that much good-naturedness staring me in the face all the time, I would set something on fire," Grantaire says.

Courfeyrac laughs. "Then it's a good thing he lives with me, isn't it?" he says. "Come on, it's acoustic night. We need to set up."

Ever since the night that the electrics died, acoustic night has become a public event, a much-requested and well-attended institution at the ABC. Courfeyrac keeps gushing about the fact that it's shaking things up, bringing in a fresh audience, but Grantaire likes how low-pressure it feels. Like if he closes his eyes and ignores the applause he could be back in his garage in high school, jamming terribly and teaching himself to play, before everything about his life started to unravel.

Grantaire's singing to himself as they set up, _brother what a fight the people saw_ , not sure why this song in particular has crawled out of his brain. Oh, right: _The Night The Electrics Died_ , dum da-dum-dum.

Technically he's not working tonight, but he joins Eponine behind the bar anyway once the doors of the ABC open, and he hands her beers and ciders from the fridge in between sips of his own. It's a nice change, being able to talk without yelling.

"Are you favouring us with one of your own works tonight, our lady of piano?"

Eponine shakes her head. "I thought I'd have something new, but it's not ready yet. Joni Mitchell."

"Ah, the classic. If you don't like having your own feelings, let the audience have them for you." Grantaire toasts her with his beer bottle, then drains the rest of it.

"Put up or shut up," Eponine says, bumping his shoulder with her own as she reaches up to grab the gin. "You're opening the show for us, aren't you? Don't tell me you're actually singing something solo."

"Heaven forbid," Grantaire says.

"Are you ready, Grantaire?" Marius hovers at one end of the bar, a truly unfortunate hat tilted far enough forward on his head that his face will be shadowed almost to obscurity when he's playing. It's not the best disguise in the world, but Grantaire of all people recognises a layer of symbolic self-protection when he sees one.

Eponine looks between Marius and Grantaire with an expression like someone faced with farting royalty.

"When have you two ever rehearsed together?"  
  
"Rehearsed?" Grantaire says blankly, mostly to see her scowl. "We'll just trust to the gods of music, present company _not_ excepted," raising his voice even though Enjolras is nowhere within earshot, "that our serendipitous sound won't frighten too many small children. Though the only one of those around here to be frightened is your charming brother, and I've seen him lie down with his head between two pounding speakers because, and I quote, it made his teeth feel fizzy." He takes a breath. "I think we'll be fine."

"Optimism, from you?"

"That's _my_ disguise," Grantaire says, tapping a finger to his nose, and then follows Marius up onto the stage.

Their instruments are up there already. They sit angled in to one another on stools, like a campfire triangle, inviting the audience to be the third point. There's a smattering of applause, as well as a sincere whoop of enthusiasm that is almost definitely Courfeyrac.

"Come in whenever you're ready," Marius murmurs.

Grantaire wasn't just needling Eponine, before: the closest they've come to rehearsing this properly is the accidental jam session from which the whole thing arose. Marius has an astounding library of songs in his repertoire, left over from the _Idol_ gig, and on the day this mashup was born he was playing and singing his way softly through the Top 40 chart, waiting for Enjolras to come out of the studio so that they could have an earnest conversation about commercialisation or whatever the idealist flavour of the week was. Grantaire's ears perked up when Marius suddenly switched to Elliot Smith and then to Live, and his bass was handy, and -- well, they didn't manage to _talk_ much, but they had a good time tossing other people's songs back and forth until Enjolras emerged.

Now Marius smiles and nods, once at Grantaire and once at the audience, and starts to play. Some musicians hold their instruments like they're in love with them, or at least planning to show them a _really_ good time; Marius holds his like a child, or perhaps a skittish pet, with soothing fingers and that fond smile on his face. There's something of the chameleon to his voice, obviously, but Grantaire thinks that if Marius had made it all the way through the reality TV thing and out the other side, this is the kind of music he'd have ended up making a career out of: heavy on the guitar, simple harmonies, and just a whisper of roughness to the vocals.

Grantaire lets him make his way through a verse and start in on the chorus. In anyone else's mouth it might sound cheesy, sarcastic even -- _bring your burning skin to my river once again_ \-- but Marius sings it sincerely, darting a grin at Grantaire as Grantaire lifts his bass.

This isn't a mashup so much as two songs sung at one another, but Grantaire likes the _mess_ of it, the way it sounds like an accident, like the mingling of two different stories being played out in two different rooms. Marius' story is a homecoming; Grantaire's is the undercurrent of fear, someone fumbling a feeling that's too large for their skin. But the chords mesh well. The sound is good. The audience is swaying, nodding, letting themselves be carried away on it.

" _I want to start over, I want to be winning, way out of sync from the beginning_."

He's not as comfortable a baritone as Matt Berninger, but he does appreciate a song that's designed to be sung like you almost can't be bothered.

Marius stops playing first, and Grantaire lets his own bridge circle around a few more times before winding down into wistfulness -- " _You know I dreamed about you…_ "

At the end of the song he falls back into his mind and looks out. He looks where he always looks, his gaze swinging and settling like a compass needle, and this time Enjolras is looking back. There's a look on his face that Grantaire hasn't seen before.

It lasts a second, maybe two.

And then the light changes, someone touches Enjolras' elbow, and everything moves on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marius and Grantaire's faux-mashup consists of 'The River' by Live and 'Slow Show' by The National. Janmot's _Flower of the Fields_ [looks like this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_of_the_Fields); insert your own piano.


	6. Chapter 6

One year later, a tiny girl with a voice like sugared moonlight crashes her way into Grantaire's life, like a white billiard ball expertly aimed, and sends it spinning in every direction.

It'd be nice if he could say that he created something in that time, that something changed for the better; the best he manages is to maintain a routine. He tends bar at the ABC, he plays gigs at least weekly, he co-exists with the increasingly entrenched domesticity that is Joly and Bossuet and Musichetta. He finds in Eponine the kind of friend he's never bothered to make before, the two of them tumbling together and rubbing one another raw enough with their tongues and personalities that one day they realise they've bled all their secrets, mingled all their messy juices, and Grantaire would bare his teeth and beat the world senseless on her behalf. He never had a sister, growing up. It catches him constantly by surprise.

He drinks. He sings. He drinks some more. He settles into the city. Los Angeles, too, suits him, even though he never thought to find anything like a home here. His depression comes to visit for weeks at a time, making itself comfortable like a relative you allow to crash for the weekend and glance up to find still snoring on the couch two months later; not _negating_ his enjoyment of life but looming alongside it. The world expands and contracts around him, sometimes colourful and sometimes less so. Grantaire figures that having recognised his shitty mental health for what it is is half the battle. It never gets as bad as it did in Portland, and he always manages to claw his way to the surface for long enough to take a few deep breaths. He's not one of life's grand achievers. _Half_ the battle will do him just fine.

He watches Enjolras. And watches, and watches.

After a year this love of his is worn smooth at the edges, like a piece of glass taken out and turned constantly in the palm; he hardly ever cuts himself on it now, except for occasionally, when he's not expecting it. When Enjolras latches on to a new idea and his eyes carry that fever of belief. When Grantaire stands in the doorway of the studio, coffee in hand, and catches Enjolras with headphones on and head tipped back, eyes closed in concentration, the bracelet on his wrist catching the light as he taps out a beat.

Grantaire remains the least dedicated out of all of them to the injustices and corruptions that fill half of Enjolras's days. He still listens to every bar of every track that DJ Enjolras releases. The music, the podcasts, are the most public part of Enjolras. But sometimes, when Grantaire is sitting in his now-accustomed seat at the public library with his earbuds in and his sketchbook in his lap, they feel like something more intimate.

His foot is tapping to the track, but he doesn't start really listening to the singer until he looks down at the page and finds himself drawing a carousel inhabited by polka-dotted horses, and realises he is craving iced mocha from Café Lemblin.

Grantaire's pencil pauses on the page. He remembers the girl singing in the café, a long time ago, now. He bought her CD and gave it to Enjolras. And now, here's her song, broadened and spun out into something darker and more catchy by Enjolras's additions.

A set of fingers tipped with gold glitter nail polish snap themselves between Grantaire's eyes and the sketchbook.

"You're actually smiling about something," says the voice attached to these fingers, loudly enough to be heard over the music. "Are you an imposter?"

" _Shh_ ," comes frostily from the computer terminals nearby.

Grantaire sighs. "Fuck off, Montparnasse."

Montparnasse ignores this with his usual air of complete entitlement, and slides into the seat adjacent to Grantaire's.

Grantaire finally caved and struck up a real conversation after six months of running into the guy at the library: six months of Montparnasse smirking around like the obnoxious asshole he so clearly is, but also leaving Grantaire romance novels as an overture of friendship, like a cat leaving the heads and feet of dead birds.

As well as his unhealthy affection for romances, Montparnasse seems to haunt libraries because he has a penchant for obscure magazines, ranging in subject from indie fashion to J-dramas to motorcycles to ecologically sustainable architecture. He never wears the same outfit twice, and never appears in anything that looks like it cost less than Grantaire's monthly income. Grantaire still doesn't know what he does for a living, if anything, but has a suspicion that large parts of it are both nocturnal and illegal.

Grantaire's long since reached the conclusion that Montparnasse is basically Cher from _Clueless_ , only with no soul to speak of.

"I don’t think real horses look like that," says Montparnasse now, stealing one of Grantaire's earbuds. He proceeds to settle one fashionably-booted ankle on the opposite knee, open a bridal magazine on his lap, and ignore Grantaire companionably until the end of the podcast.

It's one of the afternoons where Grantaire's energy gives out abruptly by four o'clock, leaving him kneecapped by fatigue and disgruntled at home, half dozing and half watching a marathon of some procedural show or other. He keeps falling asleep in the middle of one episode and waking up blearily during the next, never quite seeing the murderer get caught. It's like watching a very long film about a serial killer whose victims and methods keep swinging wildly from one thing to another. Good way to avoid arrest, Grantaire thinks, shortly before he falls properly asleep.

The upshot of _that_ being that Grantaire isn't at the ABC on the evening when Cosette Fauchelevent, she of the sugary vocals and the fairground remix, follows the sound of her own voice to DJ Enjolras and launches her brilliant billiard-ball self into the midst of Les Amis. The first Grantaire hears of it is at seven the next morning, when his phone--jammed under the cushion he's using as a pillow--gives an insistent _bleep_.

The text is from Enjolras, and clearly sent to everyone:

_Come to ABC for an important meeting. I may have found the first artist for our label._

Grantaire's stomach gives an uneasy flip that he doesn't think he can put down to the usual morning-after sickness or to anxiety. He thumbs a quick message to Eponine: _what's going on?_

Her reply doesn't come until he's on the bus to the club: _nothing good. come in and you'll see_.

After hearing her song the day before, Cosette is high enough in his mind that he recognises her when she steps through the door of the ABC, visibly taken aback at the number of people who answered Enjolras' summons and are there to meet her. She still looks young and impish, but subtly more adult in what she wears: a sundress, her hair in a simple ponytail, a delicate necklace and a flash of pale eyeshadow. Looking at her next to Enjolras highlights even more the fact that Enjolras usually looks like he got dressed in a cave home to several species of insect which have evolved without eyes.

Enjolras at full passionate throttle is hard to resist, and Cosette's energy almost matches his. They make Grantaire feel tired just listening to them. He hides thankfully in his well-doctored coffee, and once the two of them have swept like a talkative musical tidal wave into the recording studio he hunts down Eponine, who hadn't bothered to show her face at the meeting. It's not a good sign. Usually she keeps close tabs on Enjolras and his pet projects.

"So," Grantaire says when he finds her. "Our fearless leader has managed to entice the only pop-industry sob story more adorable than Marius Pontmercy to show her face at the ABC, and between one earnest polemic and the next we've got a battle for creative liberty on our hands. _Very_ poetic. I expect the strains of I Want To Break Free to waft out from the studio at any second, though this girl's as unlikely to look as good in a tank top as Freddie Mercury."

"I don't want to talk about it," Eponine says shortly. She's in the alley, taking delivery of metal vats of beer, and she lets out a harsh breath. "You could make yourself useful, R."

"Never," Grantaire says, on autopilot. "That's against my religion."

He can usually rely on Eponine for a dry comeback about his lack of faith, either general or specific, or at least a few bars of R.E.M. in that shimmering throb of a voice. But her face is closed.

Her grudge of a mood is catching, nibbling and fraying at the never-too-robust edges of Grantaire's own, and by the time Grantaire heads to the wedding gig he's playing that evening, he's feeling foul all over. Rotten and spiked. He blurs his way through the set and ends up leaning against a wall in a back alley behind the hotel kitchen, steadily working his way through some half-empty bottles of red that were left on the tables, while one of the girls from the serving staff chain-smokes next to him and laughs at his spectacularly slurred jokes. She's not bad company. Her name's Mia. She's a college senior and is saving up for a graduation tattoo, lines from a poem by someone called Duffy. She says them aloud, using the full controlled length of an exhalation, words chasing smoke. _Memory's caged bird won't fly. These days we are adjectives, nouns. In moments of grace we were verbs, the secret of poems, talented. A thin skin lies on the language. We stare deep in the eyes of strangers, look for the doing words._

At three in the morning Mia stubs out her final cigarette and insists on pouring a bottle of water down Grantaire's throat before they part ways.

Firmly entrenched in drunken logic land, where all relationships and the people in them are evil, Grantaire doesn't want to go back to his own place and the fourth-wheel existence he's living there. His brain's a whir, and the city is lit up, and he hums the same songs over and over as he hauls his bass through the streets. It's nearly seven by the time he staggers into the ABC, mostly sober, cranky with having been awake through the transition, vibrating with tiredness but not at all inclined to sleep.

He probably doesn't make a good impression on Cosette, one-on-one. But who cares what she thinks of him; _he's_ not an important part of the whole ABC experience. She's here for Enjolras and his recording studio, and Enjolras himself apparently has heights of robot self-denial (or sheer, bloody absent-mindedness) that Grantaire wasn't aware of. He hasn't seen Enjolras with a real new Cause in his hands before. Cosette's suffering at the hands of her record label gives Enjolras a focal point, a concrete ideal, and the fire is wonderful. Grantaire feels like a cat, stretching out shamelessly in front of the flames. He doesn't know whether to resent her for it, the way she's shaken their lives into a new shape. But he likes her. As with Marius, it's difficult not to, and Grantaire's always been particularly weak for the believers. He likes her fearlessness, her anger like rock candy, and the songs she writes. She sings about longing like she's actually felt it. Her lyrics stick sweetly to the backs of the teeth and won't budge.

The problem, of course, is Eponine.

There's liking and there's _loyalty_ , and it's clear as glass that Eponine's been wounded. Cosette has usurped two places that Eponine had always assumed were hers by right, even if she wasn't lifting a finger to step into them. Enjolras has thrown the weight of his name, his following, and his label instantly behind Cosette, having given up on Marius a long time ago, but…it was meant to be Eponine. Always. Sure, she's never gotten around to recording anything, they're still scraping together the funds, and Enjolras can get so caught up in large ideas that he needs to be nailed down to smaller action, but--

No. The rest of it is an excuse. Grantaire's an expert in succumbing to inertia, but it turns out that even the endlessly-driven DJ Enjolras has his blind spots: things that can get lost and fall behind. What the label actually needed to get off the ground was the sheer vim and push that Cosette provides because she's got nothing else in her life, and is young and vivid and desperate.

And Grantaire values his safety and his fake-sister too much to say it aloud, but the collaboration loophole in Cosette's contract aligns very neatly with the hole in Enjolras's creative abilities. Her style of music suits Enjolras's heavy production style better than Eponine, whose voice stands best alone.

"You and Enjolras have never been able to record a single song without fighting the project to an early grave," he's pointing out, phone tucked under his chin, as he digs through his closet in search of something that he isn't going to sweat through five minutes into acoustic night.

"And the heavenly Cosette doesn't fight with _anyone_ ," Eponine says, not very nicely. "Cosette's --God, she's like a bag of fucking sugar. She's so sweet it must be a trick."

"And you're sour about it," Grantaire says. "Put you together and you've got a whole lemonade stand."

There's a silence long enough that he gets nervous. He pulls out a soft T-shirt, grey-blue, the logo faded almost to nothing. He pulls it on quickly, and it's only when he fiddles with a stray thread at the hem that he remembers he was wearing it that night, the night of We Don't Talk About Portland.

"I was thinking," Eponine says finally. "I want you to sing with me tonight. We should do--"

”No," Grantaire says.

She makes a frustrated sound. "What exactly do you think's going to happen, if you muster the guts to spit your feelings into a microphone?"

"''Ponine."

"It's what the rest of us do."

"I can't hear you," Grantaire says, "I'm going through a tunnel," and makes static sounds into the phone while she laughs at him and finally yells, "We're not done discussing this, R!" and hangs up.

Grantaire stands in front of the narrow mirror and hums, then sings, trying the high notes out, warming up a part of his voice he hasn't used in a while.

" _I just want to say: don't ever change now, baby_."

He looks at himself wearing this shirt which Enjolras creased with his long, wonderful fingers; which Enjolras pushed up his stomach and finally tugged off, impatient over Grantaire's head, stretching the neck of it so that it's never sat evenly since. Memory blinds him for a moment. It makes him feel even more contrary than usual, even more annoyed at Enjolras for being able to set the past aside, and even more furious at himself for being unable to do the same.

Perhaps that's why, when Eponine corners him over dinner at the club and holds the container of fried rice out of his reach--flashes her incredible eyes at him, daring--Grantaire says only, "I can't remember how that one goes," lying through his teeth in a way that means: pour me two drinks and we'll see.

Eponine softens towards Cosette after that night, even goes so far as to help her with writing lyrics. Grantaire lets himself believe that a status quo might be tiptoeing back towards their muddled group of friends, right up until the moment that Marius tries to kiss Cosette and Cosette, bless and curse her impulsive heart, tells him the secret that's second only to Grantaire's own in the stakes of Everyone Knows Except The Object Of Affection. Obliviousness is everyone's friend. There are _rules_ , and Cosette's stamped her pretty shoes all over them.

Grantaire finds out about this disaster early the next morning, via an ill-advised group text from Courfeyrac. Its implications become clear when Musichetta stomps into the break room from the bar area and scans the assembled breakfast-eaters with her sharp eyes. She passes over Jehan (staring glumly at a printed thesis chapter, red pen in hand) and Bahorel (using two more of Jehan's pens to absently improvise some rolls on the table edge, while occasionally pointing out typos) and lands, of course, on Grantaire. Who is doing as much nothing as humanly possible.

"Eponine's not coping well. You're up," she tells him.

"Me?"

Musichetta puffs a sleek lock of blonde hair out of her eyes, and pulls Grantaire out of his seat with a surprising amount of strength for her thin limbs.

"You," she says. "I just got my head bitten off for my troubles, and I have to go to work."

"Maybe she'd like to be left alone?" says Jehan, the soft voice of reason, but Musichetta just rolls her eyes.

"There is a growing problem in this group," Grantaire protests, as he is manhandled towards the door, "of people thinking they know what is best for people."

"Oh, we could make it worse." Musichetta slaps his hip, hard, where his flask sits in his jeans pocket. Her brow is furrowed. "You really want us to go down that road, Grantaire?"

Grantaire raises his hands in surrender and escapes to the bar, where Eponine is polishing glasses like she's trying to wear holes in them. As soon as Grantaire enters, she whirls around and jabs a glass in his direction, as though picking up a rant mid-stride.

"You know what, I thought she might be--I thought I'd misjudged her. Fair enough, she wants Marius, I can't fault her taste," with a twist of her lips, "but I thought she'd be content to--"

Grantaire leans against the wall. "Set her cap at him?"

An unwilling laugh bursts out of her, and she shakes her head. "Musichetta needs to stop giving you her Regency romances. Yeah. If she wants him, why doesn't she just _take_ him? How _dare_ she tell him that I..." Eponine stares at the wall. "And to look at me like I might..."

"Well now," Grantaire drawls. "During previous meetings of our lonely hearts club, I've given you all the grisly details of my past liaisons, disastrous though they were, God have mercy on the poor lads _and_ lasses involved, et cetera. And you never thought to tell me just how far you sympathised? Should we be adding the word 'bisexual' to our manifesto?"

Eponine gives him a poisonous look. "I never said that."

"Nobody gets under your skin like that. And lovely skin it is too, my darling, but my experience of you is that you're bulletproof just like Sia sang and David Guetta threw the beat behind, unless you actually give two shits about the person in question."

"But _why_?" There's a throb of genuine pain there, as only Eponine's voice can manage.

Grantaire shrugs. "Seems to me you're making our dear Cosette out to be a bit more Machiavellian than she really is. And as someone living in the glassiest of glass houses when it comes to poor romantic decisions, I'm not about to start tossing rocks at her head. Everyone makes mistakes."

Grantaire's cynical soul does wonder if Cosette really is wearing her heart as openly on her sleeve as she seems to be, but there's no evidence that she _isn't_. Like Musichetta, she believes that she deserves to be loved, a simple self-conviction that means someone in her life has already loved her unconditionally. You've got to have that, to...well, set your cap...at not one but _two_ of the ABC's most admired faces.

On the night of Cosette's new song debut, Grantaire lets her music spill its determined rhythm through his body, and smiles as she whirls around in Courfeyrac's arms. Her ponytail is a river, reflecting every coloured light. Courfeyrac is so much taller than her that it wouldn't surprise Grantaire to see her skid halfway across the club when released from his hands, like a spinning top whose string has been whipped away, but the two of them hold on tight and grin into one another's faces. Behind the bar, Eponine has the kind of look on her face that Grantaire recognises from his own mirror.

Enjolras, in the booth, has his eyes closed. Grantaire's gaze catches on him, and stays; Grantaire loses track of time. Sometimes it feels like he's spent his whole life here, in this place, standing within these walls painted as bloody homage to his own feelings, watching Enjolras and feeling the lower registers of music push longing through his veins.

The song comes to an end. Cosette, laughing and nervy like a wilder version of the fairy sprite he once dubbed her, pulls Enjolras out of the DJ booth. She tugs Enjolras down to the dance floor and Grantaire starts to smile, but he feels it waver on his face as it becomes obvious that Grantaire himself is her destination. Grantaire can feel his equilibrium faltering, can feel every phantom edge on the piece of glass he's been carrying around. Cosette, Cosette, sending them spinning.

"Talk," Cosette says, her voice loud and bright with satisfaction. She gives Enjolras a push, and Enjolras is obviously startled enough to go with it, stumbling to stand very close to Grantaire. "Talk about your love of nineties music."

Then she flits away again.

Grantaire waits for the usual babble of nonsense to surge up and give him something to spill into the silence, put them back on familiar ground, but for once nothing's there. If he lifted his arm even a little he could touch Enjolras, and that's a dangerous place to be. The clubgoers dance and shift around them, and neither of them moves.

For his part Enjolras looks nonplussed, like he sometimes does when he's stuck without a speech or a script.

"Can we talk tomorrow?" Enjolras says.

"Sure," Grantaire says, banishing an unwarranted burst of hope. He's not sure which of them he's letting off the hook.

But Enjolras only frowns more deeply, something stressed and almost vulnerable leaking in at the edges of his expression, and pulls out his phone. "How's ten o'clock?" he says.

"Oh," Grantaire says. "Oh, you actually _mean_ , talk tomorrow."

"Eleven?"

"Ten's fine," Grantaire says. "I can do any time, you know me, it's not as though my social calendar is full of pressing engagements."

"Ten," Enjolras says, and then he looks fixedly at Grantaire like a complete weirdo until Grantaire pulls out his own phone and makes a show of entering it on his calendar, which is a bit of a charade given that Grantaire could ignore-slash-forget-slash-sleep-through tea with the Queen of England if his brain decided not to play along on the day.  

But he's at the club the next morning, bang on time, making coffee in the kitchen to fight off the sickly carpet-fuzz of his hangover and feeling off balance about the whole thing. The air in his lungs is thin and taut with anticipation, as though this is some kind of job interview. Cosette wants them to talk. Enjolras is doing what Cosette wants, these days. It's all very bizarre.

Ten o'clock ticks by. Grantaire leaves his half-empty mug in the kitchen and wanders around; Enjolras isn't in the club space, or the studio. Grantaire can hear music coming from down the hall, where the bedrooms are. He'd assumed it was Gavroche, but the predominance of synth and the lack of Kanye or Drake is making him rethink that.

Grantaire stands for a moment outside the pulled-to, though not entirely closed, door to Enjolras' bedroom. Something has lodged itself in his throat.

He raps loudly with his knuckles and then pushes the door open. Enjolras is dressed and half-sitting against pillows on a double bed with a cheap metal frame, staring at his laptop, from whence the music is blaring. Most of one wall is taken up by a huge bookcase, books messily stacked and shoved and arranged two deep. The only decoration on the walls is a huge poster-print of _Liberty Leading the People_ , which Grantaire stares at for at least ten seconds, feeling like the world is playing some kind of practical joke on him and he's yet to stumble across the punchline.

He looks back at the bed when the music stops.

"Of course," Enjolras says. He closes the laptop at once, and sets it on the floor. "Ten o'clock. I lost track of time."

He climbs off the bed, and takes a few steps towards Grantaire, but doesn't push past him or suggest they go back downstairs. He's wearing jeans and a loose yellow T-shirt that doesn't flatter him even a little bit, and he's still the most beautiful thing Grantaire has seen in this city of beautiful things.

Enjolras looks anxious. As though he's aware of some danger hurtling towards this conversation that Grantaire has managed to miss. The total strangeness of where they are, and why, is still fumbling around in Grantaire's guts.

Grantaire says, "So, my question is, why would Cosette think we need to talk about nineties music? I love it for the most part, you hate it, we already knew--"

"I don't hate it," Enjolras says. Rattles it out like coins dropped on a bar.

Grantaire's mouth is open. He closes it. "What?"

"I don't hate an entire decade's worth of music, Grantaire, how irrational do you think I am?"

"I don't know." Grantaire needs to be either less hungover or a lot more drunk for this conversation. "How psychic do you think _I_ am, then, because clearly every time you said that you _did_ hate the nineties, I was supposed to think, oh, well, that's no more rational than trying to start a record label around a political ideal, Enjolras the Morally Unimpeachable must be lying for _no fucking reason at all-_ -"

"Will you _shut up,_ will you listen _-_ -"

"Ah, good. Now we're back on familiar ground."

He waits for the lightning-strike of Enjolras' next move, but it doesn't come. There's a break in the rhythm. Enjolras is staring at him with his eyes wide and his expressive hands making angry curls between them, and then Enjolras steps forward and lays one of those hands--slowly enough that Grantaire could stop him--over Grantaire's mouth.

"Grantaire," he says quietly. "Why won't you ever just listen _._ "

Grantaire's heart is every dance anthem ever recorded, vicious and strobing in his chest, but he can't let that stand. He takes one step backward. Enjolras' hand doesn't follow him.

"No," he says. "No, you don't get to--no. I'm always listening to you, Enjolras, I am _always_ listening. And if there's something I'm meant to have heard beyond your absurd objection to a decade that gave us Shirley Manson and Kurt Cobain, then you're going to have to summon some of that famous capacity for preaching to the lowest common denominator and spell it out for me, because you've made your feelings pretty clear."

"You are infuriating," Enjolras snaps. Quiet moment gone. "The way you go on, and on, and never anything _important_ , you say you don't care about anything, but someone brings up chord progressions and pop-punk influences and suddenly you care so much, it's _insulting_ , the fact that you can't muster any of that for real issues and real people who are struggling within the confines of--and I'm not an idiot, I'm not blind, and you have _no idea_ how I feel."

"About...nineties music," Grantaire says, like a man in a swamp, testing for footholds.

"I don't hate it," Enjolras says again. He looks intent and sublime and all of Grantaire aches to sway back into his hands, as though magnets have been planted there.

"You don't," Grantaire says. "Well, would you care to characterise your feelings, Enjolras, because on behalf of those of us in the cheap seats--"

"Oh, for God's sake," Enjolras explodes, so sharply that Grantaire is rocked back. Enjolras does shove past him, now, but it's only to pull the door closed. Shutting them in. When he turns around, there's an expression on his face that is entirely new. "I hate being _reminded_ , can't you understand that, every time I _look_ at you I remember, and I'm tired of constantly having to remind myself what my priorities are. You make everything so much more difficult than it's supposed to be."

Grantaire feels like he's holding in his hands a house made of spun sugar, infinitely precarious. He was telling the truth. He's always listening.

"What do you remember?" he says, softly.

"Grantaire--"

"Tell me," Grantaire says. His lips are dry. "Or I'll tell you, shall I do that, instead? I'll tell you what _I_ remember about that night."

"Grantaire," Enjolras says again. Grantaire can't tell whether it's a plea or a warning, and he doesn't care.

"I remember I wanted you from the moment I saw you, and I wanted you when I left the hotel the next morning, and I wanted you every second in between. Even when I had you, when _you_ were having _me_ , it was barely enough for the size of how much I wanted."

He takes a step forward, closing the distance again. Enjolras doesn't budge; Enjolras' eyes are glittering and his beautiful mouth is half-open, frozen around the start of something.

Grantaire goes on, selfish, merciless.

"Am I reminding you? Good _, fuck_ you, I'm not going to apologise for that, because I remember _everything_. I remember you kissed me first. I remember you had my shirt off before we were fully through the door of the room, I remember how you sounded when I was sucking you off--yeah, do you remember that? Me on my knees because I couldn't wait long enough to make it to the bed, I had bruises that lasted for _weeks_ , am I _reminding_ you about how you grabbed hold of my hair when I was down there, how you shoved me down into the sheets afterwards and fingered me until I screamed?"

Enjolras hasn't moved, maybe hasn't breathed.

Grantaire is shaking. He's angry, he's scared, he's setting a bridge alight and diving from it into black water. He can hear the raw sharpness of his own voice, somewhere between needling and begging.

"Enjolras," he says, "every time I look at _you_ I remember what I can't have again, and every time I remember that I kind of want to die, because I have _never_ stopped wanting you, that has never gotten any smaller, and I--"

Enjolras makes a choked noise and grabs at him like a drowning man.

For a mad second Grantaire honestly thinks Enjolras is trying to shut him up by smothering him, or maybe knocking his head into the wall, but Enjolras grabs hold of his face with both hands and pulls him in and then--doesn't move, just holds them there. Their foreheads and noses are touching, Enjolras' hands tight to the point of pain and Grantaire's covering them in an aborted instinctive attempt to get free, his fingers fitting through the gaps until all he can feel on his own cheeks is a block of warm pressure, anchoring him to his breath where it shudders out into the tiny, almost-nothing space between their mouths.

"You--" Enjolras says, and kisses him as though it's the rest of the sentence.

 _Oh_ , Grantaire thinks. A moment of clarity like winter air on his skin. _I remember this_.

Enjolras kisses like the world could end at any moment, with an intensity that Grantaire could lose himself in, and Grantaire doesn't know what to do with his hands. His problem is that he wants to touch every inch of Enjolras at once, and part of him's still not convinced this isn't a vivid daydream. The whole thing's taking on the shape of an out-of-body experience and for a long time Grantaire can't do anything but keep his hands pressed over Enjolras' hands and kiss him back.

It stays like that, frantic and unreal, for God only knows how long. Grantaire isn't exactly sparing braincells to keep track of time. He has to keep taking undignified gulps of air which hiss over his lips, because Enjolras doesn't seem willing to allow for anything longer. Their bodies are moving against one another and the kiss goes sloppy, both of them managing to keep their mouths meeting again and again but nothing more coordinated than that.

Grantaire scrapes his teeth across Enjolras' lower lip and Enjolras moans, his perfect mouth opening too wide. His hands have moved and are tight on Grantaire's hips now.

"Oh, God," Grantaire says, "oh my God, please," not even knowing what he's asking for.

"Yes," Enjolras says, hoarse.

Grantaire kisses along Enjolras' jaw, forcing himself to slow down. He gets his hands on that hideous yellow shirt and yanks it up, off, and then helps Enjolras when Enjolras seems inclined to give Grantaire's shirt the same treatment. Skin. Fuck. Skin, skin, _skin_ , and Grantaire shoves Enjolras back until Enjolras is sprawled on the bed and Grantaire can crawl on top and sit on his hips and finally, dizzily, take stock.

He takes a few deep breaths.

If Enjolras in an ugly shirt is beautiful, then Enjolras in nothing but old jeans and a glazed expression is outright pornographic. Grantaire can't do anything in that moment but splay both of his hands out on Enjolras' chest, pale fingers against olive tan, and stare, covetous and paralysed.

He ducks his head down and kisses Enjolras with a long and wondrous press of lips. Enjolras arches his neck into it, eager, and Grantaire has to sit up again in order to take some more breaths, because if he doesn't get a hold of himself he's going to end up going off in his jeans before they can get properly started, and he's still half-convinced that one or both of them will snap out of reverie at any second. Plan. He needs a plan.

"Fuck," he breathes, and kisses Enjolras again, because his mouth is _right_ fucking there and kind of--swollen, and pink, and Grantaire's only human.

"Wait," says Enjolras, flailing a little bit beneath him.

"What, is this against your vows of pure and chaste devotion to the Cause? Are you having a moment of musical inspiration? Because that would be flattering, don't get me wrong, but also _really inconvenient_. Or maybe you've suddenly remembered about a no-fraternisation rule hiding in the footnotes of my employment contract."

Enjolras looks nonplussed enough that Grantaire's brain catches up and realises that this is absolutely something Enjolras might be insane enough to insist upon, to prevent himself from theoretically abusing his position of power like a lecherous psychiatrist. Grantaire scrabbles in the pocket of his jeans, pulls out his phone, and stabs wildly at his contacts list, feeling giddy.

"What the hell?" Enjolras hisses.

"Hello?"

"Bossuet? Bossuet, my dear friend, I have an urgent legal question."

He loses his train of thought for a moment because Enjolras stares at him for a second longer and then actually starts to _laugh_ , with a small helpless smile that softens his entire face. Grantaire smiles back down at him, charmed to the core.

Bossuet sighs. "I told you, I'm really not--"

"No, no," Grantaire says. "Don't worry, this one you might actually know. When you read through that ridiculous contract of mine, do you recall stumbling across any clauses designed to legally preclude our fearless leader from sexually ravishing his employees? Or vice versa? It's very important. I'm asking on behalf of my union."

There's a choking sort of noise from the other end of the phone, followed by a muffled crash and then a familiar yowl of pain: startled, but not altogether surprised.

"Bossuet?" Grantaire says warily.

"What is it?" Enjolras asks, and then, because he's not stupid, "Is he all right?"

"Um," says Bossuet's voice, after a while. "Sorry about that, R, just dropped a box onto my--never mind, I'm sure it'll be fine. My toe's bleeding a bit. Well. A lot. There's actually quite a lot of--" and then a sort of sigh and another, louder crash.

Grantaire stares at his phone for a second and then hangs up and dials a new number, trying to ignore the way Enjolras is now frowning and making restless little movements that, by accident more than design, rub their groins together through the denim.

"Hey, Joly?"

"Really," Enjolras starts, trying to sit up, but Grantaire reaches out and presses two forbidding fingers against his mouth. Enjolras' eyes widen. The frown doesn't disappear, but he settles back down again.

"What's up, R?"

"Are you anywhere near the--the apartment?" Grantaire tries to steady his breath, but Enjolras' tongue gives another slow sweep across the bass-string calluses on his fingertips. Enjolras' annoyed expression is turning to low-lidded focus.

"I'm a couple of blocks away, we needed milk. Why?"

"I think Bossuet's injured his mouth, I mean, I mean his _foot_ , fuck--"

"Grantaire?"

"--and then I think he might have fainted. You can get him to the hospital, right? It sounded like he was bleeding a fair _ow_."

That's Enjolras biting down on his fingers, hard enough that Grantaire snatches his hand away. Enjolras pushes himself up in one determined motion, and Grantaire has to move off him or tumble right off the bed. The loss of him, the hungry gaping where his body used to be, turns Grantaire's fingers stiff with need.

"We should go and help," Enjolras says stubbornly. He stands and crosses the room to where his shirt is inside-out on the floor.

On the phone, Joly cuts short his hysterical tangent about broken foot bones and something called osteonecrosis, and promises in eager tones to get Bossuet to the nearest hospital immediately. Grantaire hangs up and looks at Enjolras, uncertain and annoyed.

He's fighting to pick the most obvious question in the frustrated mass of them--mostly variations on _what the hell good are we going to be, Joly is a lot closer and has a car and half a medical degree_ \--when he remembers abruptly that this whole thing started because Enjolras said _Wait_ , and that maybe this is Enjolras seizing an excuse to shut this down without having to come right out and say that no, he's changed his mind, he doesn't want it.

"Oh," Grantaire says. He feels suddenly cold. He sits on the edge of the bed and looks around for his own shirt, and can't filter the bitterness from his short laugh. "Yeah, of course we should do that."

Enjolras stops what he's doing and looks confused, then just as frustrated as Grantaire feels, then he walks back across the room and climbs matter-of-factly on top of Grantaire's lap, settling down and lifting Grantaire's chin with one hand. It's not gentle, not forceful, just a pragmatic motion that allows him to fix Grantaire's gaze with his own. The weight of him is amazing. Grantaire wants to inhale his warmth and never let him go, and he has no idea what the fuck is going on.

"Right, I'm lost," Grantaire says, still faintly bitter. "I thought we were leaving."

Enjolras sighs. "Stop it. I'm not--look." He pauses, thumb running thoughtfully back and forth along Grantaire's jaw. "Joly's handling it?"

Relief slips over Grantaire like a blanket. "Yeah. He'll make sure Bossuet is fine, you know he will. So. Bleeding toe injuries and legal documents. I do know how to ruin a moment, don't I?"

Enjolras makes his _Grantaire-you're-being-deliberately-obtuse_ face and kisses him, deep and rough. He shifts forward until his knees are splayed on either side of Grantaire's legs and his hands are buried in Grantaire's hair. Grantaire runs his hands up to Enjolras' shoulderblades, then down his back, not quite daring to slip below the waistband of his jeans. Enjolras gives an encouraging roll of his hips, and Grantaire leans forward and gasps into Enjolras' chest, letting them rock together, feeling pleasure spike through him. Muscle bunches beneath his palms.

"Grantaire," Enjolras says, and tugs.

Grantaire lifts his head, obedient, looking right into Enjolras' eyes with the fatalistic relief of someone who's left the cliff edge far above and has nothing to do now but succumb to gravity. He was braver, the first time they did this. He didn't know Enjolras, not really. He didn't know anything except that there wouldn't be a second time. And he was wrong about even that.

Shit, now he's thinking about the first time again. _Whatever you want._ _I need you._ Enjolras doesn't _need_ anything, but Grantaire has never felt like this, not before or since. Like something poured out, liquid and entire, into another person's cupped hands.

"What do you want?" he blurts. "Seriously, what can I do?"

He means: how can I keep you. But that's an impossible question.

Enjolras tucks his lower lip between his teeth and rolls it out, cautiously slow and _maddeningly_ hot, even though Grantaire can tell it's accidental. All he's doing is giving the question real thought. His eyes bore into Grantaire.

"I want to watch you," Enjolras says, low. "Is that alright?"

Grantaire manages to swallow both hysterical sarcasm and the desire to grab Enjolras by the hips and grind against him until both of them come in their pants. He doesn't know exactly what Enjolras means by that. He doesn't care; he's plummeting. He takes a tiny bite of the inside of his own cheek, holds it, and then says, "Yeah. Yes."

What Enjolras means, it turns out, is that he wants to divest Grantaire of both jeans and underwear and have him naked in the centre of the bed, lying flat so that Enjolras has easy access to his cock. Enjolras wraps a hand around it and strokes him, a frustrating jazz piece of a handjob, never falling into a single tempo, but experimenting. Pausing often, hair falling across his cheeks, to glance keenly up Grantaire's body. Watching, watching.

Grantaire, roiling with molten need and close to hyperventilating, wonders if it's perverse of him to find the most arousing thing about all of this to be Enjolras' other hand, which is pressed firm and flat at the very lowest point of Grantaire's stomach, covering the point where the trail of dark hair begins to widen. Something about that placement, something about Enjolras' untidy fingernails and the way each finger is distinct and scorching on Grantaire's skin, is almost more unbearable and more incredible than the movement on his cock.

Grantaire is used to carrying shame around, talking at him in either his own voice or that of his parents, but this is the one area of his life where he's comfortably shameless. He doesn't give a fuck about the faces he might be making, or the occasional tear that forms at the side of his eyes. When Enjolras finally dips his head and uses his mouth, suckling gently and then hollowing his cheeks as he draws Grantaire deep, Grantaire makes a high and broken sound that he would hate himself for in any other setting.

Enjolras freezes. When Grantaire glances down, he has Grantaire's cock poised between his lips like something too obscene to be real. His eyes are wide and wondering.

Then he bends his head and seems to devote himself single-mindedly to the task of getting that noise out of Grantaire again. And oh, Grantaire is happy to oblige him. He'll make as many noises as Enjolras wants; he pushes a hand through Enjolras' hair, barely managing not to grab at the back of his skull and pull him further down. Enjolras--did Enjolras do this, in Portland? Grantaire thought he remembered everything, but things are slipping, now. Enjolras' mouth is so wet, _fuck_ , and for some reason Grantaire gets stuck looking his his eyebrows, at the curve of his neck.

"Shit," he hisses, "shit, shit, Enjolras--I'm--"

Enjolras pauses, and then clearly makes a decision, and gives a challenging rub with his tongue. He's always known how to commit to a thing, Grantaire thinks wildly; and then Grantaire is coming like a traffic collision, bucking and gasping as Enjolras sucks him through it and holds him down with that flat fucking hand.

When Grantaire can bring himself to move again, Enjolras is undoing his own jeans, shoving them off. His cock is straining against the blue fabric of his underwear, darkening it, and Grantaire's slapped around the face by a renewed set of memories at the sight.

"Christ," Grantaire says weakly. "I don't know how this is even possible, but I am _more_ turned on now."

Enjolras gives that shock of a laugh again, simple and pleased. He presses his palm against the bulge, just once, and something flares in his eyes as he gazes at Grantaire.

"So, are you going to do something with that?" Grantaire says, in his best lascivious voice.

Enjolras tilts his head. "What would you like me to do with it?"

Grantaire makes a noise of complaint that's almost a whimper. He lets out a breath while his lips are trying to form syllables, in a half-vocalised puff. _Bheuh_. Morning light is catching on the bracelet on Enjolras' wrist. Grantaire doesn't care, fuck, he'll take _anything_ , if Enjolras will just hurry up and _give_ it to him.

"Come on," Enjolras says, stubborn. There's something almost brutal, something scalding and clever and nakedly needly, about the angle of his mouth. His mouth which was just wrapped around Grantaire's cock. "I want you to tell me."

Grantaire wonders if it's possible to immolate from sheer lust. He still doesn't know, really, what's triggered this sudden crashing-together after years of denial and truce. His mind keeps catching on Enjolras saying, _learning from past mistakes_ , and if he were a better sort of person he might allow himself to stop and think about whether this is Enjolras backsliding into something he'll regret later. His tongue is thick in his mouth.

 _A thin skin lies on the language_ , he thinks.

What comes out is, "I want to feel you all the way down my spine."

He doesn't know exactly what _he_ means, either, but it doesn't matter, because Enjolras swallows convulsively and nods as though Grantaire is making perfect sense. Enjolras rolls Grantaire onto his stomach and plays for a moment with the curls at the nape of Grantaire's neck, tender little tugs which for no real reason make Grantaire have to swallow back tears.

"Oh," Enjolras breathes, "I--" and rubs his thumb in a circle around the most prominent knob of Grantaire's spine. He follows it with his lips, drops kisses there, down and down Grantaire's back, making thoughtful swirls of tongue as though trying to taste white bone beneath the skin. Grantaire shivers as the air whispers coolly against the trail left by Enjolras' mouth. He thinks of the tusks of wild animals, of ivory, of melody picked out on the keys of a piano. Enjolras' hands are splayed octave-wide at Grantaire's sides. The silver metal of his bracelet is skin temperature and impossible to feel.

"Hold on," Enjolras says, and moves off the bed.

The gratifying rasp of his voice sustains Grantaire through the loss of his skin. Grantaire turns his head and watches Enjolras step all the way out of his briefs, toss them aside, and then rummage in the drawers of a dresser.

"I want to draw you," he says.

Enjolras darts a look at him. "You already draw me. Or did you think I hadn't noticed that, either?"

"Like this," Grantaire explains, flapping a lazy hand without lifting it off the bed. His eyes are following the lines, already: the graceful arc of shoulder and back, the slim curve of thigh muscle, the heartbreaking dip behind the knee. He needs a pencil. He needs Enjolras back here, beneath his hands. He needs to shape him in clay.

The drawer closes with a startlingly loud sound. Grantaire turns his face into the pillow and breathes. His spine is singing. Enjolras is touching him again, and Grantaire hears the click of the lubricant's cap.

Grantaire wonders at the fact that Enjolras has these supplies in his room, and wonders how close the expiration date would be if he looked at them, and whether it would be worse if they were new or old. And then Enjolras is pressing into him, first with impatient slick fingers and then--too soon, but not too soon at all--the undeniable breadth of his cock, and Grantaire's not thinking at all.

Enjolras makes a sound, not musical but something more guttural, as he slides home. He sets his hands on either side of Grantaire's, creased with tension; he's holding some of his own weight. His chest lies against Grantaire's back; Grantaire feels it when he inhales, and feels it when he starts to move.

This is. This exactly what Grantaire was asking for, exactly what he meant, when he opened his mouth: Grantaire engulfed in the tangle of sheets and half-drowning against the pillow, the too-hot and altogether glorious pressure of Enjolras against his back, Enjolras gasping into his ear, cock angled shallowly and stroking fire from Grantaire with every thrust.

After a short while Enjolras pulls away and kneels up, tugging and guiding until Grantaire's knees are bent too, pulling Grantaire back onto his cock. The new depth of it is like being split open along the seams. Grantaire's own cock gives a mad shudder and starts to harden again, starts to crave the friction that it's now being denied. On his hands and knees Grantaire clutches at the sheet and gasps, "Jesus, Enjolras, _fuck_."

"Oh," Enjolras says, "oh, you look--" and there's something almost tragic scraping at the edges of his voice. He slams into Grantaire and says, "You make me so _selfish_."

The air stops and simmers in Grantaire's lungs and Enjolras gives a jerk behind him, and another, his hips stuttering to a clear conclusion, and Grantaire is gratified and all that but he really would like to see Enjolras' face next time.

 _No_. Stop it. Who said there'd be a next time?

Grantaire bites down on his lip and collapses onto his front as Enjolras pulls carefully out of him. He's fine. He just needs to--rub urgently against the bed for a minute, probably. He looks sideways at the wall, at that poster, at the glowing Turner-yellow clouds that serve as Delacroix's backdrop to violence.

"Grantaire," Enjolras says, gently. He strokes a hand down Grantaire's arm, down his side, and Grantaire turns in a sudden movement to grab his face and kiss him. It's fast enough that he doesn't have to look into Enjolras' eyes. He doesn't want to know, yet, what he'd find there.

Enjolras' lips now are as gentle as his voice, insistently gentle, in the same way that Enjolras might insist that Courfeyrac gets enough sleep or that Bahorel gets the last bagel bite. There's a science experiment like that, isn't there? Cornstarch and water, making some kind of sludge that resists and firms up when punched, but will glide meekly through your fingers if you handle it with delicacy. Grantaire will absorb Enjolras' snapping passion and shove right back, but he's helpless against this, against the taste of his mouth and the feather-light touch on Grantaire's cheek.

And another touch, lower down.

Grantaire hisses in almost-pain, then has to grab Enjolras by the wrist to keep his hand on his cock when he makes to pull away. "No, it's fine, it's--God, just--softer, can you--"

"Of course," Enjolras says. He kisses Grantaire again and moves his hand, softer, responsive and light against the sensitive skin, and Grantaire gives slow sobbing breaths as his second orgasm swirls its way to the surface.

After, Enjolras wipes his hand on a distant patch of sheet with glorious unconcern, then turns back to look at Grantaire. It's warm in the room, but not so warm that Grantaire won't start to feel uncomfortable in a few minutes, lying naked and a bit sticky on top of rumpled sheets.

"Um. Can I use the shower?" he asks.

Enjolras' face flickers; Grantaire's stomach clenches, and he sits up. They're losing the rhythm again. It's like a mid-set malfunction, the sound system suddenly giving up the ghost, the few seconds in which a heaving dancefloor crowd continues to move to a beat that's vanished, before disorder slows them down.

"Are we." Enjolras clears his throat. "Are we going to talk about it?"

Grantaire can't read him, but he knows what happens when they try to talk, and who is he fooling? He's not boyfriend material, he never has been, and if he's never been good enough to hold the attention of the people he's lukewarmly dated, then how the hell could he ever be good enough for Enjolras?

Of course this is Enjolras backsliding. Of course he'll regret it eventually. All Grantaire can hope for is to take as much as he greedily can, while the window of opportunity is still open.

He lets the unfairness and the heat wash all the way through him; waits for an ebb.

"No," he says.

"I see."

Grantaire holds his breath, hoping and dreading and uncertain, because Enjolras fights for the things he wants. No: for the things he believes should exist.

But when Enjolras speaks again it's with a careful placement of words. He sounds like Combeferre, like he's leading someone dispassionately down a logical path.

"Is this going to happen again?"

Grantaire looks at him with an ache like the hum of an unresolved chord lingering in the air; looks at the hesitation clouding Enjolras' brow, the bitten edge of his lips. He still can't read him, but it doesn't sound like Enjolras is fishing. And it doesn't sound like a question that has to be answered with words.

So Grantaire leans over and kisses him, still can't believe he's allowed to, helpless with the pleasure of Enjolras' mouth pliant and immediate beneath his.

He keeps the words in his throat, gilds the back of his tongue with them: _I'm yours however you want me, for as long as you want me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mia, who has excellent taste in poetry, quotes from 'Moments of Grace' by Carol Ann Duffy.


	7. Chapter 7

"You do know there's a typo in the petition, right?"

Enjolras' head shoots up. "What? Where?"

Courfeyrac, leaning in the doorframe, is typing with one spidery hand while balancing the laptop on the other with the ease of a professional waiter. "Simmer down, fearless leader. It was a triple s in _possession_ , and I've just fixed it."

Grantaire hides a smile as he turns back to the coffee pot. The handle of it cracked almost all the way through last week, and some enterprising soul has made an attempt at fixing it with some Halloween-themed decorative tape; a freshly filled pot still causes the plastic to creak and wobble alarmingly, and one day someone (Bossuet) is going to end up with coffee scalds, but at least now there are tiny cheerful pumpkins wrapped around it.

"Has it passed two thousand signatures?" Enjolras asks

"Two hours ago," Courfeyrac says. "The people are in agreement: our darling Cosette is a cause worth getting behind."

It's been two days since the launch of "Lights", and Grantaire has been home for exactly long enough to change his clothes and pick up a pile of sheet music. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to kick him in the side of the head.

Grantaire distributes coffee around the room. Courfeyrac, still typing, gives a quick grin of thanks and hooks his laptop-hand's thumb through the mug handle. He balances coffee and computer with the blithe unconcern of a man who has never used a roommate's hair dryer to Lazarus a hard drive the night before a paper on Jackson Pollock is due.

"Two creams," Grantaire says, setting a mug by Enjolras' elbow, "two sugars."

Enjolras looks up at him. "I don't--"

"You took one bite of your toast and then didn't notice when Gavroche stole it off your plate on his way out. Two sugars."

"...thank you," says Enjolras, and takes a gulp of coffee, and _doesn't argue further._

Grantaire looks around to see if anyone else has noted this freakish milestone. Their potential audience is Courfeyrac, who is still tapping away at the Café Musain website, Jehan, who is staring down the barrel of his thesis deadline and may not have slept in the past week, and Joly, who has managed to catch a freak cold from a patient and was deposited at the ABC by Musichetta on her way to work, with strict instructions not to let him open his textbooks or to convince himself he has meningitis. Joly is sniffling into a pile of Kleenex and looks on the verge of falling asleep on his folded arms.

Nobody is looking at Enjolras, or Grantaire, or Enjolras-and-Grantaire. It seems uncanny. Grantaire feels like someone has glued mirrors to every exposed bit of his skin. He wants to lean down and bury his face in Enjolras' hair, to inhale the skin beneath Enjolras' ear.

Or maybe he's just wanted those things, or things similar to them, for long enough that his desire has become part of the furniture. A normal part of his face.

"You're welcome," Grantaire says, far too late.

"It's important that we have a plan to keep the momentum going past this rush of enthusiasm that the song release has bought," Enjolras says to Courfeyrac.

"Two thousand signatures!" Courfeyrac further endangers his laptop with a wave.

"We can do better than signatures. You _know_ what Justice Records--"

Grantaire tunes out, pours another cup, and forces himself to leave the room before he climbs into Enjolras' lap and finds with seeking fingertips the scratches he knows he's left on Enjolras' back. The final cup of coffee he takes in to Eponine, who is practising alone in the centre of the club's stage. The notes rippling out from under her hand are pensive and slow. She stops playing as soon as she notices Grantaire approach, jerking her fingers away from the piano as though caught doing something she shouldn't.

"What are you singing tonight?"

"A few things," Eponine replies. "I haven't decided on the final setlist yet." Her hair is in a messy braid and she's wearing a creased T-shirt, but her lipstick is a fierce, dark red. It comes off in a smudge like blood when she takes a sip of coffee. "How's the voice?" she adds, offhand enough that it takes Grantaire a moment to catch the suggestiveness there.

Eponine knows. Midway through the afternoon of the first day, Grantaire dragged his incredulously glowing body out of Enjolras' room to fetch coffee and snacks--and check that he hadn't stumbled into an alternate dimension--and ran smack into Eponine in the hall. Grantaire will always treasure the memory of what her face did then.

So Eponine knows, but they haven't had a proper conversation about it yet. Maybe they won't need to have one. It's not like there's anything left for Grantaire to tell her about his feelings, and he doubts she wants to hear the messy, glorious details of the actual sex. More, he doesn't want to share them, not even with her. DJ Enjolras is a public figure; Enjolras the person is a conglomerate of preoccupations. The side of him that Grantaire is now allowed to see--the _naked_ side--is, if not a secret, at least unknown.

Luckily, he can probably head her off if he oversells it straight up.

"You mean, have I sucked enough cock to really _scrape_ along the low notes?"

Eponine coughs into her coffee. Her shoulders shake. "Thanks for that, R."

Elaborate shrug. "You asked."

"I didn't _ask_ if--"

Grantaire looks over his shoulder when Eponine cuts herself off. Marius looks as droopy as it's possible for a beanpole of a young man to look, and he darts a transparent look at Grantaire and Eponine before hastening his stride through the club. The scuff of his feet is loud in the sudden silence, drowned only by a muffled shout of laughter from the direction of the kitchen. It's amazing that someone can be so genuinely pathetic when the root of their problem is that they are the the object of desire for not one but _two_ beautiful girls. Musichetta could probably lend him a book or seven about it.

As soon as Marius has disappeared again, Eponine builds an angry-sounding chord, one finger at a time jabbing down onto the piano keys.

"I need to keep working on this, and then I'm making calls to our suppliers," she says. "You can take your--your throat, whatever, and go make sure our stock records are up to date. People keep asking me if we have that new trendy IPA--"

"Cloverfield? Clover something?"

She nods. "Local brewery. I guess we should look into ordering a couple of cases."

"Buy local," Grantaire says. "Enjolras probably has a whole speech about that."

Eponine looks up at him, amused. "Go away," she says.

Grantaire detours through the kitchen to see if there's anything left in the coffee pot. Marius has splayed himself in a chair like a despondent spider, and is scribbling something on a clipboard. Joly is asleep on the table; Jehan is gently laying a jacket over his shoulders. Courfeyrac has vanished, and Enjolras has the glazed eyes and rapidly-tapping fingers which indicate he's about to do a similar vanishing act in the direction of the recording studio.

Enjolras has finished the toast. Or at least, there's nothing left on the plate but crumbs.

"Marius, are you finished?" Enjolras reserves for Marius the kind of impatient indulgence that others reserve for puppies too young to be expected to know how to sit. Most people would find it insulting, but most people aren't as pathologically good-natured as Marius Pontmercy.

"Done."

Marius holds the clipboard out to Enjolras. Grantaire intercepts it as it passes in front of his face, and reads the first sheet of paper. It's a hard-copy version of the petition on the website; it was printed out before Courfeyrac caught the triple S in _possession_. Mystery collaborator, trapped by unfair contract, free the music, et cetera.

"I thought this was exactly the kind of slacktivism you like to decry," he says.

"Cosette needs to see that the people are on her side," Enjolras says.

"Yes, the people are oh so eager to go to the extreme idealist efforts of moving a pen around on a page, or clicking a button on a website."

Enjolras frowns and makes to lift the clipboard out of his hands, but Grantaire lunges for the pen abandoned by Marius and signs his name on the next free line with a flourish. He holds the petition out for Enjolras to take. Enjolras stares at the paper, and his fingers overlap Grantaire's by a margin too considerable to be an accident, as he takes the clipboard back. At the sight and the touch of those fingers, a recent sense-memory grabs and shakes Grantaire with the force of an electric fence.

"I'm," Grantaire says, through numb lips, and then, "stocktaking," and escapes temptation. On the way out of the kitchen he remembers that he was originally in search of coffee, but he's not going back now.

Grantaire does the stocktaking. He has to count the bottles of wine in the bar's fridges twice, because halfway through he realises that he's totally zoned out in favour of that particular sense memory again, and has been absently stroking the condensation-slick neck of a bottle of pinot grigio in a way that would let him in for merciless mocking if anyone were around to see it. Once he's done, he opens his own ancient laptop and fills out the Google spreadsheet that serves as the central timesheet for the ABC's employees. He loses a solid three hours dicking around on /r/relationships--Les Amis do not have the market even remotely cornered on weird romantic drama shit--before suggesting a series of increasingly ludicrous edits to the DJ Enjolras Wikipedia page. All of them are shouted down by a zealous editor demanding that Grantaire cite his sources.  

Grantaire sits on his hands until the urge to type something about his first-person experience re: the location of various freckles and what kind of music the esteemed DJ Enjolras thinks is appropriate to fuck to (Peter Gabriel-- _why_ ) passes. It's all moot in the end; his laptop whirs and chugs and freezes and finally crashes the browser in a judgmental fashion.

The crowds at that acoustic night are unusually large and unusually loud. The blazing beacon of Cosette, as amplified by Enjolras, is bringing a new energy to a population who tend to be at best 50% interested in creative freedom and the injustices of the corrupt music industry, with the other half of their interest split between the club's music itself, the hotness of the bartenders (well, the _other_ bartenders) and the world-ending attractiveness of Enjolras himself.

Grantaire is staring at Enjolras, who is standing in his usual corner, out of sheer habit. He realises with an odd squirm in his stomach that he doesn't _have_ to stare. He can't bring himself to reach out and touch with purpose, but he crosses the floor of the club before he can think too hard about it and stands next to Enjolras, leaning against the wall with him, so that their arms are brushing. They're not talking about it, but they can talk about other things, right? It might even give them something to salvage from the inevitable wreckage.

A cheer rises as Eponine takes the stage. Grantaire amends his mental pie chart, doling out a fair percentage to the small but dedicated group of people who couldn't care less about ideals but are always willing to be wrapped in the spiderweb of Eponine Thenardier's voice.

"How was your day?" Enjolras asks.

"Really," Grantaire says. "How was my _day_."

Enjolras smiles. "I thought you would prefer that to my updating you on the progress of the petition."

"Are those the only two options? You know, Courfeyrac called me the Enjolras Turing Test, the first day he met me. I thought he was being unfair at the time, but maybe there's something to it. I can just see you with a placard. Equal Rights for Artificial Intelligences."

Enjolras looks more curious than insulted. "Why would he call you that?"

Grantaire looks around the club, picking their friends out of the crowd. Marius has his eyes glued to the stage; Courfeyrac and Combeferre are making up for his inattention, busy at the bar. Grantaire leans close, as though to deliver a secret, and drops a quick but heated kiss just beneath Enjolras' ear.

"Portland," Grantaire says. "Proof of life, or at least proof of libido."

It's difficult to tell, in the club lighting, but Grantaire thinks that Enjolras flushes.

" _I could swallow the seas to wash down all this pride_ ," Eponine sings. Raw and challenging, daring someone to love her. Daring herself to be loved.

They stand side-by-side, listening, throughout Eponine's set. Grantaire doesn't move again. He is overwhelmingly aware of Enjolras, all of his cells attuned, like the sense that birds and deep-sea creatures have for the poles of the world. Tiny magnets in his flesh, tugging. If he thought the longing was bad on the basis of a single night then it's ten times worse now, when the memory is acute and overwhelming, and when Enjolras is no longer looking over his head or through him or around him, but _at_ him, smiling faintly.

This should have been a loosening. Having Enjolras should have been the _release_ of something, but now Grantaire is greedy, He wants more than he knows he should take. He wants to enclose Enjolras, to drag him back to bed, or to any place where Grantaire can have that smile and that energy all to himself. Which is impossible, because Enjolras is Enjolras.

Grantaire need a distraction. Thankfully, Eponine is standing up from the piano now, and she swipes a hand beneath her eyes that smudges her mascara. He takes a deep breath and forces some space between himself and Enjolras.

"You're up, Apollo. Your public awaits," Grantaire says. "And I'd better go and play the oblivious bodyguard before someone get gutted."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at her," Grantaire says, nodding at Eponine. "Weren't you listening to that? She's just sung her walls down. Our lady of piano won't want to deal with a crowd, no matter how packed with entirely justified admirers, for a minute or two."

Enjolras blinks. His eyebrows are slightly raised, his gaze very steady. He looks and looks into Grantaire's face.

"What?" Grantaire demands.

A small smile. "Nothing."

"You're going to fucking kill me," Grantaire mutters. He slides his thumb quickly beneath Enjolras' bracelet, a simple heated caress over the centre of the wrist, and then drags himself away. He walks over to sling an arm across Eponine's shoulders and smack a kiss against her cheek, ignoring the way her flayed-open gaze skims over the crowd.

"Divine, splendiferous, the music of the spheres," he intones. "And she's too short to be visible, so stop looking."

Eponine's elbow finds his side, followed by her arm snaking around his waist. She leans against him. That more than anything else tells Grantaire that he was right about her walls and the minute she needs to build them up again.

"Next time I'm pulling you up there with me," she says, nodding to the stage, where Bossuet and Enjolras are having a conversation of gestures as they adjust the equipment. Cosette's latest song is dancing out from the speakers.

Another elbow. Grantaire finds himself fixed with one of Eponine's longest and darkest stares.

She says, "You still watch him like you want him."

"I _do_ still want him."

"That's not what I meant. Does he even know how you feel?"

"Will you--Christ, this isn't one of life's grand romances," Grantaire says, irritated. "It's...fun."

Eponine gives him another of those long looks, and drops her arm from his waist. "R," she says. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

"It's _Enjolras_. His soul belongs to the Cause, but if he'll lend out his body, I'll take it. This is how I had him before, and this is clearly the only way it's possible to have him."

"By taking whatever he'll throw you? Have you even _tried_ to talk about it?"

That stings, tiny barbs in his heart, and this thing with Enjolras is going to be _good_ , it's working, so what the fuck does Eponine think she's playing at?

"I know I'm usually the one smelling of sour grapes, or at least fermented ones, but do I detect some on you as well? Not very friendly of you, to begrudge me leaving you the sole lonely heart."

"That is such bullshit," she snaps. "This isn't doing anything for your heart, R."

"Oh, don't be such a fucking hypocrite, 'Ponine. As if you wouldn't have leapt into bed with our dear Marius in a second, at any point in the past year, if he even had the balls to make such an offer."

Eponine draws herself up, as furious as he's ever seen her, as furious as he feels, and Grantaire realises with a stab of sickly irritation that she's seconds away from tears.

"Right," she says. "Yeah, my mistake, you're clearly in a _great_ mood."

She likes having the last word more than anyone else Grantaire knows; she's already moving, storming off, before she's flung out the last of the sentence. Grantaire lets her go.

Marius is nowhere to be seen, and the bar is two-deep in customers along its whole length. When Grantaire steps behind it, Combeferre throws him a hectic nod. Grantaire tends bar through the rest of the night. As the club empties, Courfeyrac yawns his head off, and eventually Combeferre shoves him out of the door with instructions to go home and sleep. Grantaire makes a circuit, gathering the beer bottles and glasses that have been stowed in dark corners or balanced on top of amps. He pushes an armful of sticky glassware across the bar and takes a seat at one of the stools to catch his breath. It's been busy enough that Grantaire's a few drinks behind his usual, for this hour. He takes a long swig from his flask, feeling the glad burn of it at the back of his throat.

"Grantaire."

A palm lands on the nape of Grantaire's neck, a hesitant touch that backs away, then lands again, firmer and more confident.

Grantaire turns, dislodging the loose grip. The look on Enjolras' face is a complicated question. Grantaire stands and answers it, leaning back against the bar and pulling Enjolras in to kiss him. Kiss him and kiss him, slowly, thoroughly. Fuck it. Fuck everything. Grantaire can have this, and he will.

When he pulls away, Enjolras licks over his own lips, tasting. He can't be chasing anything more complex than the contents of Grantaire's flask. The sight of it is still electric.

"Mazel tov," comes from behind the bar. "Now move your hands so I can clean."

Grantaire looks over his shoulder. If Enjolras' look was complicated, then the one on Combeferre's face is a fucking Escher picture. Grantaire gets a handful of Enjolras' shirt and looks down so that he doesn't have to see something that could be guilt begin to crystallise around Enjolras' mouth.

"I want to make some changes to one of the remixes going out on the next podcast," Enjolras says to him, like that's a normal thing for two in the morning. "Are you staying?"

"I'm staying," Grantaire says.

Combeferre leaves. Grantaire stays. He turns off the lights, takes out the trash, locks and double-checks the building's entrances, slowing his steps like a child peeling back the tape on a birthday present piece by controlled piece, determined to wring the maximum pleasure from anticipation. Enjolras hasn't left the studio by the time Grantaire makes it upstairs, so he swallows his feeling of intrusion and waits in the bedroom, alone, swamping his thoughts with a catalogue of its contents. The keyboard in the corner is a lot smaller and older than the one in the studio, and a good three octaves of the keys are buried under legal pads and scraps of loose paper, all of them barcoded with the cramped and urgent scrawl of Enjolras' handwriting.

In the absence of anything else to do, Grantaire has a lukewarm shower in the ensuite, keeping his hair mostly out of the spray. He then has an utterly absurd debate with himself about how much of his clothing is reasonable to put back on again, and ends up sitting against Enjolras' pillows, playing a mind-numbing phone game, in only his boxer shorts.

Enjolras pauses in the doorway, on his return. His hair has the familiar specific roughness of recently-removed headphones and his face is the blank alien planet, untouchable, that means he's off inside his head, wrapping words like ropes around the necks of invisible enemies. Grantaire's stomach lurches with the frankly likely possibility that Enjolras forgot all about him, and was expecting an empty bed.

But Enjolras is motionless, distant, for only the space of a breath. His eyes land on Grantaire; he closes the door without turning around, tugs off tonight's unsightly T-shirt in a convulsive series of movements, and Grantaire has barely enough time to set his phone aside before Enjolras is on him, splayed out on top of him, getting a hand beneath Grantaire and cupping his ass, tugging up so that Enjolras can grind down, the atmosphere going from nothing to panting and urgent in no time at all.

"I'm going to make you scream," Enjolras mutters against his neck, "I'm going to make you _sing_ ," and Grantaire believes him; Grantaire will do anything Enjolras wants. He bends and lifts his knees to cradle Enjolras between them, and Enjolras jerks his hips and leans down to lick and suck over Grantaire's nipple.

"We are so fucking good at this," Grantaire gasps. "I don't think it's normal. Fuck. This is--is this how it usually--what am I saying, you don't have a _usually_ , you're a monk, you--"

Enjolras kisses him, savage. " _Shut up_ ," he says, and moves until he can slide his dick against Grantaire's through their clothes, a pressure, a promise. Grantaire grabs blindly for the zip of Enjolras' jeans. He feels like he's in a race, his brakes useless, flying downhill.

This part is amazing; and easy, so easy. Who the hell needs words?

The speed with which Enjolras falls asleep afterwards is almost obscene. Grantaire rests his cheek on folded arms and stares at him in the dull street-side illumination that pours through the blinds, torn between the dreadful tenderness that wells up within him at the sight of Enjolras' fucking _eyelashes_ , and the urge to shake him awake for the sole purpose of demanding how he does it. How anyone can close their eyes and just _sleep_ , quickly and predictably and undisturbed. It seems like something from a fable.

After another half-hour, which feels more like a geological age, Grantaire gives up on the prospect of sleep and sits up entirely. He memorised Enjolras' face a long time ago, but now he thinks he could make a good stab at photorealism, or a fractal portrait series: starting with the whole face, then focusing in, closer and closer with each frame, never losing detail. He could sketch the exact irregularity of each eyebrow, the exact shadowed groove beside the nose.

He touches Enjolras lightly, a brush of knuckles along the man's forehead, and keeps gazing, soaked with the sight of him and still not sated, like an ever-expanding sponge. Now Grantaire _can_ have all of him, just for these hours, when the mind is quiet and the soul is...well. Where is the soul in a sleeping body?

Grantaire wants a drink. If he were alone he'd go and find one and bring it back to bed, but he's reluctant to tear himself away. The part of him that avoids breaking mirrors is convinced Enjolras might disappear, if he did. Instead what he brings back to bed is a guitar, quietly extracted from beneath the keyboard in the corner of the bedroom. It's been a long time since Grantaire played guitar instead of bass, and he can't remember seeing Enjolras pick one up more than a handful of times.

He keeps a sharp eye on Enjolras through the first soft strum of the strings. Enjolras sleeps on with not even a flicker. With any luck, this music will simply work its way into whatever it is that someone like Enjolras dreams about.

Soul, meet body. Grantaire plays, picking the song apart and creating it again, losing track of time. His fingers ache and his bent bare leg is warm with the pressure of the guitar. He works on the chorus with his eyes closed, paring it down and down until the individual notes strike like stabs of longing. _Feel what it's like to be new._

When Grantaire opens his eyes again, Enjolras is awake. He hasn't moved much, just propped his head up on one hand.

"No, keep going," he says, when Grantaire's fingers still.

Grantaire does. He isn't singing, but he hears, and he thinks that Enjolras has enough of an ear to hear, the places where the words would sit. Voices gliding gentle as a lover's hands over the stripped-back tune. _If the silence takes you, then I hope it takes me too._

"I like that," Enjolras says, with a smile.

It's simple praise, but it warms Grantaire like a gulp of hot chocolate.

This is how he feels with Enjolras versus how he feels in the rest of his life, and he wants to carry the glow with him everywhere. He feels like a wick straining in the centre of a candle stub, reaching to the ceiling with blue and orange and heat. Look up. Look up. Don't look down or you'll see how little time is left to you.

His sleep doesn't get better. It gets worse.

Grantaire's routine is the same as it ever was, except now he waits for Enjolras to come to bed and worships him with hands instead of eyes, drinking his fill of pleasure and something that skates dangerously close to joy. And then he either lies awake, aching and exhausted, or he drinks himself to oblivion and then wakes in constant fitful starts that leave him itchy and irritable in the morning, not refreshed at all, but somehow having to go on with life anyway.

He's not sure if Enjolras notices. Enjolras doesn't open his eyes until his alarm goes off; and besides, Grantaire's not exactly going to talk to him about it. Grantaire's not rocking this boat at all. He's finally got the one thing he wanted, and they're _fine_ , everything is fine. Everything would be perfect, in fact, if Grantaire could only sleep.

He is worn thin with fatigue. His fuse gets shorter. Moving through his life feels like walking across a shell-strewn beach with feet that have never been out of socks before, tender coddled skin, every tiny bump and sharp edge become enormous and unbalancing. He almost has a meltdown when his inbox shows an email from his mother, and has to gird himself with half a bottle of wine before clicking on the thing.

It's barely three lines. _You don't seem to be using your Facebook page. Are you working on any paintings at the moment? We'd like to hear from you. You don't have to call, just reply._ Grantaire wonders what triggered this reaching-out, whether it was hearing a song on the radio, or an ad for an art exhibit on the side of a bus.

He deletes the email. He feels guilty about it, of course, but that's nothing new. He doesn't have anything to say to them. _I'm still tending bar and playing at parties for rich children?_ That would trigger the only possible response, which is both correct and useless: this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't dropped out of college. His mother might manage to scrape together an _as long as you're happy_ which would be _in_ correct in a handful of different ways. And even if they'd ever had the kind of relationship where Grantaire shared the details of his personal life with them, he can't fathom how he'd go about telling them about Enjolras. _I've met someone?_ They met a long time ago. _I've started sleeping with one of my friends?_ So drearily, yawningly mundane for this feeling in Grantaire's chest like swallowed lava, for the way Enjolras sometimes drags at Grantaire's lips with his teeth like he's starving.

The truth is, I'm in love and I'm falling off a cliff.

The truth is I don't know if I will survive the impact.

The ABC becomes almost as depressing a place to be as anywhere else, with both Eponine and Cosette rattling around the place like tragic poltergeists. Enjolras, single-minded and emotionally tone deaf to the last, is doing his best to drag an album out of Cosette, and for all that he insists that Grantaire's a welcome distraction, Grantaire knows better, and forces himself to seize excuses to stay away. Grantaire's band accepts an unusual mid-afternoon gig, a large company's family picnic. They play on an outdoor stage with godawful acoustics, little children bopping with determined and uncaring enthusiasm in front of it.

It's not his day to tend bar, so after the gig Grantaire goes home, where Joly and Bossuet and Musichetta stare at him in ill-concealed surprise and then greet him cheerfully like he's been away on vacation. Grantaire manages to doze a few hours, that night, before his mind breaks the sticky surface of sleep. His mouth feels fuzzy.

He turns on the lamp to find the glass of water he knows is somewhere on the floor, and in the yellow light he catches sight of the piles of clothes, the brushes sticking out of mugs and crusted with paint, the dust. The corpse of a moth on the carpet.

Grantaire sits on the edge of his bed and has a short, ghastly panic attack, one of the rare ones that leaves him feeling first trapped in a suffocating body and then detached from it. While he's breathing himself down to normality, the door to his bedroom creaks and Musichetta's upper body appears, clad in a fluffy purple robe.

"I saw the light," she says. "You okay?"

Grantaire experiments. To his absolute relief, air will now enter his lungs when he inhales.

"Oh, I've never been better. In the pink. Pinker than pink, though I'd have to say that for a pasty Oregonian export I've managed to avoid turning too many shades of salmon since arriving in this sizzling hellhole of a state. Score one for never cultivating any hobbies, pursuits or occupations that take place outdoors during peak UV hours, I guess."

Musichetta waits this out. "I'm making garlic bread," she says, when he's done.

Grantaire plays that back through his mind a few times, in case he misheard.

"Seriously?"

"Midnight snack." She gives a jerk of her head. "Come on. No point lying here beating yourself up for not being able to sleep on command."

Grantaire bites his tongue. Her voice, warm and practical, gets itself around his limbs, and he follows her out into the kitchen, which smells like--like a pizza place has collided with something sweeter. He sniffs the air. "Is this garlic bread _candied_?"

"Crap." Musichetta lunges for a saucepan on the stovetop. "Warm milk, with maple syrup. Oh, thank God. This stuff goes weird if you burn it."

"Maple syrup in milk? Did you grow up in a Canadian cabin?"

"My mother did," she says calmly. "Or at least in Ottawa. This is madeleine-level childhood comfort food for me."

"Proust references at midnight," Grantaire says. "Keep an ear out for the Mountain Goats soundtrack to whatever indy film we're clearly in."

"You're certainly dressed for it." Musichetta waves at his flannel shirt and then turns away to decant the milk into mugs. "Did I tell you I was going to be a lit major, before I did pharmacology? I read _In Search of Lost Time_ to impress a guy in one of my tutorials."

"Was it worth it?"

"Not in retrospect." She bites down on her lip, smiling. "But I thought sex was _supposed_ to be that boring, at the time."

"And now you read romance novels."

Musichetta slides garlic bread off a tray and onto some plates. The golden-brown edges and sizzling centre look so good that Grantaire kind of wants to cry. "And now I read exactly what I want," she corrects him. "Literature is dreadful, for the most part. Jane Austen knew her stuff, but I'm done with having dead dudes and their dreary obsessions shoved down my throat."

Grantaire triumphantly locates some dark rum at the bottom of the pantry, and tops up his own mug with it. He hovers the bottle over Musichetta's mug, but she shakes her head.

"What're you doing up, anyway?" Grantaire asks.

She shrugs. "This happens every couple of months. By now I've learned there's nothing to be done except stay awake until I'm tired again."

"Wow." Grantaire manages to wrest the bitterness from his voice, but it only makes the self-deprecation stand out more starkly. "I'd give a kidney for it to only happen every couple of months."

"Hey, you need your kidneys."

He lifts his mug in illustration and shoots back, "Not as much as I need my liver."

Musichetta is quiet a moment, watching Grantaire drink. "Have you tried taking anything?"

"Like what, weed?"

She laughs, sudden and soft. "Like...melatonin. Like _Prozac_."

That's hilarious. "I don't think Prozac can fix me."

"Fix? No. Help? You might be surprised," she says. She looks away and takes a huge, loud bite of bread. Crumbs scatter everywhere. When she finishes chewing and looks back at Grantaire, her eyes are lighter. " _So_. We've got another _ménage à trois_ forming in the group. You've seen more of it in person than I have, and I've only got Cosette's side of things to go on. Tell me everything. Tell me if it's exactly like _The Knight's Dilemma_ , I know you've read that one."

"I don't know about _forming_ ," Grantaire says, wary. "Cosette wants it, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen." Even as it's coming out of his mouth it sounds like a lie, or a jinx. Cosette's cheerful willpower is an invisible mass, tugging things into shape around her.

"I've been thinking about it," Musichetta says. "Cosette's exactly what Eponine and Marius need.  God knows they were useless before she arrived."

Grantaire opens his mouth to say something about Cosette's interfering ways, chokes on hypocrisy, and takes a bite of garlic bread instead. All of his own present happiness is down to her blabbing on about nineties music, and shoving Enjolras at him. Even if his cynicism rebels at her sheer emotional exuberance, he won't stand in the way of her happiness. Or Eponine's.

"I can see it now," Grantaire says. "You're going to use this as an excuse to start roping the rest of us into neat little trios."

"Who would you prefer?" she asks solemnly. "Courfeyrac, or Combeferre?"

Grantaire laughs.

Despite Musichetta's Proustian maple-milk, he still doesn't sleep that night. But the conversation is a pin in his side, waking him up a little more to what's going on with his friends. On the early morning bus in to the ABC he forces himself to notice things, to be curious about the people around him. It feels like stretching a muscle, or inhaling fully. There's always that little bit of surprise at how much can fit, when you concentrate on it. The cosy bulge of stomach as the rest of the body makes way for breath.

At the ABC, heavy-limbed and light-headed and calm, he heads straight upstairs and falls asleep, with a relief so profound it's almost physical, in Enjolras's bed. He dozes, on and off. At some point Enjolras is in the room, rummaging through papers and pocketing flash drives, and he leans down and kisses Grantaire when he notices he's awake. Grantaire is _mostly_ sure this isn't a dream.

When he wakes up, it's early afternoon. He feels enough like a human being to hum as he invades the kitchen, toasts a quarter-loaf of bread and covers it in whatever he can find, which is butter and strawberry jam. He takes the food into the studio, where Cosette has her feet tucked up on a chair, watching Enjolras and tapping her fingers to the beat coming from the synthesiser. Her small chin digs dejectedly into her knees, and Grantaire has an inconvenient moment of forgetting whose side he's meant to be on. He knows Cosette is drooping at her failure to get through to Eponine, and he's not surprised when Enjolras prods her to leave. She needs either distraction or some good old-fashioned musical catharsis, or both, and Grantaire's not above exploiting her talent and her sadness towards his own sentimental ends.

Back down in the club, he plays her the arrangement of Soul Meets Body that was born watching Enjolras sleep. Cosette gives it exactly what it needs. Her voice twirls through it, bittersweet.

"' _Cause you’re the only song I want to hear. A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere_."

Her eyes are bright, not quite shedding tears, but close. Grantaire realises, with a pang that borders on disbelief, that she really is as open-hearted and earnest as she seems. He remembers watching her as a schoolgirl, playing and singing with less technical skill but just as much passion, and hoping that the world would be kind to her. Well, success hasn't been. And love, currently, is not being kind either, though if she's fallen for _Eponine_ as well as Marius then she must be in this for something more than kindness.

The next day he takes Cosette to the library for people-watching, to cheer her up, to open up her ribcage, to make her think about other people's stories. If it makes him do the same, then that's no more than a helpful side effect.

"Oh, what a good idea!" she enthuses, getting into it immediately. "All right, what about that woman, with the shaved head? She's got an audition later today--"

"Too easy, this is L.A.," Grantaire says.

"She's got a job interview," Cosette says at once. "At an architecture firm! And she's promised herself that if she gets the job, she'll finally let herself adopt that puppy with the big paws, the one she walks every weekend because she's got a crush on the manager of the shelter--"

They play stories for a while, in hushed voices, until Cosette freezes midway through a rambling explanation of how the cute couple wearing matching neon leggings met in the queue for a Norwegian death-metal concert. Grantaire's been around enough songwriters by now to recognise the signs.

"Lyrics?" he guesses. "Inspiration striking?"

"Yeah, I, um," she says. "I need to go home. Thanks, Grantaire." A genuine smile, just for him. "I guess I've been stuck in my own head lately."

He smiles back at her, which makes her own smile grow; on a whim he kisses the back of her hand, which makes her laugh.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she says.

Alone again, Grantaire browses a stand of CDs without really seeing the labels, and continues the game. The pair of boys bent over a single laptop and whispering furiously in a language that doesn't sound even remotely familiar--something Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi?--have run away from home and are staking out likely places to hide, or are killing time until the library closes, when they will bury themselves silently in the beanbag pile in the childrens' section and sleep here. The tall woman with large feet and a blue leather purse, who keeps smoothing down the silky scarf wrapped around her throat, is--

A wiry grip tugs him abruptly into the Reference section.

"Who was that girl?" Montparnasse hisses. "I liked her shoes."

" _Fuck_ no," says Grantaire. "She is _normal,_ don't even think about it."

"We would have such well-dressed children," says Montparnasse soulfully, and Grantaire pulls an historical atlas off a shelf and jams it into his solar plexus.

He might not have been telling the whole truth there. Cosette is wholesome, but nobody who was normal would be able to keep up with Enjolras' demanding work ethic at a time like this. She's still an artist, beneath it all. The two of them spend hours and hours in the studio, and Grantaire has an idea of where the lines are, in this thing that he and Enjolras are doing, but he can't help pushing at them; can't help wanting. He makes them toast, it being the limits of his culinary skill. He plays covers with Cosette when she and Enjolras begin to snap at one another like bratty seagulls about the production of her songs.

Once or twice during these arguments Enjolras shoves a pair of headphones at Grantaire and demands an opinion.

"Both versions sound fine," Grantaire says, honestly. "I don't know what overall sound you're going for, so--"

"But if you had to choose," Enjolras says, impatient. He turns back to Cosette. "I really think that level of drum, that emphasis on the darkness, is overselling the irony. Listeners will understand the juxtaposition without any help. Your voice and the piano still need to come to the forefront."

"Not that I don't appreciate being included," Grantaire says, with a half-laugh, "but you don't need to pretend that you care about my dubious musical taste."

Enjolras frowns. "You think I'm pretending?"

"I don't think my opinion has ever mattered to you _before_ , so why should it now? You either want me to agree with you, in which case I'll refer you to the last two and a half years for proof of why _that'_ s a losing proposition, or you want to be talked out of something, in which case I think Cosette can defend her own choices."

"I don't need you putting words in my mouth," Enjolras snaps.

"I'm surprised any more words could _fit._ "

"Grantaire--"

Grantaire tosses the headphones onto the desk, where they clack. "Stop humouring me," he says, suddenly furious. "Did I ask for this? Have I _asked_ you for--fuck."

Cosette has her lips pressed together, her pen working furiously on her notepad, but when Grantaire concentrates he sees she's drawing musical notes emerging from an angular flower, drawing over the same lines again and again.

"We could. I mean, I could take a break," Enjolras says, as though translating the idea from another language. His eyes dart to the door, and his lips are slightly parted, and Grantaire wants to fall to his knees. He wants to push his hands into Enjolras' hair and beg.

Grantaire digs his fingernail into his thigh. No. He's not going to be that person. This is what's important to Enjolras; he's not going to take it away.

"No," he says. "I'll just--be elsewhere. You work."

Elsewhere is, more and more, the bottom of his flask. He's sitting in the kitchen, alternating taking sips from it and trying to toss wasabi peas into his own mouth, when Eponine, wide-eyed and magnificent in a blue shirt-dress, strides into the kitchen and plants herself at the table with a loud exhalation.

"Marius," she announces, "has taken Gavroche to a museum. And then Cosette is apparently going to make sure his science homework gets done, God only knows how. I swear Marius has some kind of child-whispering ability that he has never bothered to tell me about before now."

"I take it the wooing-by-babysitting is well underway."

Eponine gives a little shake of her shoulders. "It's unnerving. She's so organised about it. It's like she woke up one morning, decided she wanted me, and just...launched a campaign."

"Careful," Grantaire says. "You're sounding almost fond there, 'Ponine."

"Pass me that flask," she says. "No, wait. I'm getting us a bottle."

Eponine drinks, but she doesn't often get drunk. She's fun, when she does.

"He's never-- _never_ ," she says at one point, slamming both hands onto the table, emphatic. "So what if he doesn't? Want me? What if Cosette's just-- _Major-General_ Cosette, with her campaign. Convinced him into it. Strategising."

Grantaire, feeling pleasantly blurred, scrambles for a good argument. "Marius, bless his freckled heart. Marius wouldn't lie about something big. You trust him, yeah?"

Eponine drops her head onto her hands. After a long moment she says, muffled, "Yes."

"And you trust our fairy-child-catalyst, Miss Cosette?"

"It's bizarre," Eponine bursts out.

"Yes," Grantaire says agreeably. "What's bizarre?"

"Someone like that. Wanting someone like me." Eponine lifts her head. Her entire soul is in her black, sharp eyes. Grantaire can see himself reflected in them, and more than that, he can see the glimmer of her inevitable happiness. She is tumbling towards it, pulled in by Cosette's bright gravity, and she will be loved as she deserves to be loved.

Grantaire hasn't finished his drink, but he tops it up generously and then throws back half of the glass.

"Grantaire!" Joly comes up to them, lifting a messenger bag higher on his shoulder. "I'm heading home. Are you staying, or do you need a lift?"

"A lift? Ah, I've all the lifting force I need. Lifts you up where you belong, wing beneath my winds, wait, I'll think of another one--" Grantaire, illustrating wind with a wave of one wrist, knocks over his glass. The rest of his drink spills out over the table before he fumbles to set it upright again. The sight makes him break into slurred laughter that becomes hiccups, each one an uneasy jerk of his belly that just makes him want to laugh more. Eponine, opposite him, starts to shake with laughter as well.

Joly looks at the spilled liquid, then at Grantaire. Worry, and something else, is painted across his face.

"Grantaire…"

"Wh--what?" Grantaire, still hiccuping, holds his eyes, unflinching; cheating, because Joly will always back down rather than wade into an argument if it can be avoided.

"I. Nothing." Joly looks away.

Grantaire reaches for the bottle, and begins to refill his glass.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What does one do when current events have one vacillating between crushing despair and fiery activist anger? Work on this story, obviously.

"--been told to prostitute herself and her creativity to an industry's idea of...hmm. Does that work so far?"

Grantaire lifts his head from the pillow when it becomes clear that Enjolras is waiting for a response.

"I think run a word like _prostitute_ past Cosette to see what she thinks of it, before you start waving it around as a comparison."

Enjolras nods and taps rapidly at a single key, eyes fixed on the laptop screen. The computer is balanced on his lap and he's been typing with his right hand alone because Grantaire has refused to relinquish his left. It's a compromise, Grantaire tells himself, rubbing his thumb over the centre of Enjolras' palm and following it with a kiss.

Enjolras' fingers curl in at the touch of his mouth, and Enjolras darts a look at Grantaire. His eyes are dark and the thoughtful lines of his expression flicker into a distracted smoothness.

"Though honestly," Grantaire says, "you're shouting at rocks."

"You always say that."

"And I'm right. Nothing is actually going to change that record company's practices, no matter how angry you make people. The law is still their on their side, they own Cosette's output and any court will say so."

"One step at a time," Enjolras says. "One person at a time. That's how difference is made."

Grantaire sighs. "And I appreciate your encouragement to illegally download my music as much as the next penniless failed artist, but you _do_ realise that publically endorsing it is one of the reasons that lawyer Javert was able to make a threat against you."

"Us," Enjolras corrects him, and for a moment--Enjolras' hand still warm and surrendered in his--Grantaire lets the plural expand to enfold just the two of them in this bed, in this room, a wonderful and treacherous kind of intimacy. But Enjolras means the Friends of the ABC in general. Enjolras, as ever, uncomfortable divorcing himself from his group and his cause. "Yes. He's holding us to ransom over Cosette's head."

"What do you want her to do?"

"I want her to fight," Enjolras says at once. "She shouldn't give in to their demands."

"At your expense? If Justice Records comes after you with the weight of the law and better lawyers than you can ever afford? If they ruin the label, everything you've been working for?"

Enjolras' hand tenses in Grantaire's, and he looks away. Grantaire resists the urge to grab at his chin and force his gaze back. "Either I believe in what I say, or I don't. It would be beyond hypocritical of me to ask Cosette to diminish herself, _sell_ herself, just because I'm in the line of fire."

"Of course you _believe_ , you--" Grantaire hears the edge creeping into his voice and stops. He swallows down the question, _why aren't you angrier_ , because he already knows the answer. Enjolras _is_ angry. Enjolras is a burning miracle in the shell of a man; he has enough anger for all the problems of the world.

"I hope you destroy him," Grantaire says instead.

A piece of a smile appears on Enjolras' face. He types for a while longer, fingers moving like the graceful legs of a tiny pistoning machine on the keyboard, and then nods to himself and closes the laptop with a click. He pulls his left hand clear and leans off the bed to put the laptop on the ground. When he straightens, he's holding the guitar which usually lives in the corner, and he settles it into his lap where the computer just was. Marius holds a guitar with fondness; Cosette holds hers as though it gives her strength and hides her secrets. Grantaire is trying to remember if he's ever seen Enjolras with a guitar in his hands before. Enjolras bends his knee up and curls himself over, tentative, his fingers moving indecisively up and down the frets.

"That's G," says Grantaire. "Do you need--"

Enjolras plays the chord, one sharp strum like an admonishment.

Grantaire buries his smile in the pillow. "Fine, fine."

Enjolras has the set expression and tense knuckles of someone who's lost their calluses and is regretting the long-ago purchase of 13 gauge strings, no matter how broad their sound. But he plays quickly enough that muscle memory must be driving it.

After a few bars he stops, frowning, and tries out a few hand positions.

"I don't recognise this one," Grantaire says into the pause.

"I wrote it."

Grantaire stares.

"Where are the synthesizers?" he asks, and the piece of smile comes back, along with something that Grantaire almost doesn't recognise. Uncertainty doesn't sit well on Enjolras' face. Grantaire last saw it ripple there in Portland, when Enjolras was granting himself permission.

Enjolras continues, "It's nothing. I've been working on it on and off, during the past two years."

"Oh, yes, in the copious amounts of downtime you have."

Enjolras actually grins, at that, and Grantaire's heart has no time to adjust to the onslaught of tenderness this elicits before Enjolras' fingers move on the strings, adding some folk fingering, and the song resumes.

It's wordless, and melodic in an unexceptional way. But more and more, dancing through the notes, Grantaire hears--something. A suggestion that Enjolras doesn't believe in music _just_ on the idealistic level, because you can't, to weave emotion into tune like this. It does what music is supposed to do, which is reach down inside you and mirror you. It finds the part of Grantaire that is only one more sleepless night away from fatigue hallucinations, those odd darting phantoms that haunt his peripheral vision. It finds the part of him that would like to scream in frustration, then pull his own skin over his head like a blanket to create a dark cave where nothing can touch him and he can touch nothing.

It's sad. It's a sad song.

If this were Eponine, Grantaire might able to make a black joke to show that he understands. But he can't talk about his depression with Enjolras because that's not part of what they are. And he wants to keep Enjolras the one good thing in his life that he enjoys, not contaminated with the grey dust that sticks to the rest of it. It's more than that, too: Grantaire can't _tell_ Enjolras that he's the one source of happiness, the one good thing, because that's a fucking unfair amount of pressure to put on anyone. The last thing he wants is to be one more of the things that Enjolras has to be anxious about, angry about. Sad about.

So he shoves it aside. He calls up a smile as Enjolras sets the guitar back on the floor. Smiling at Enjolras is still easy.

Sometimes in the past, when things have been bad, Grantaire's libido has shrivelled to a dry leaf; the desire he has now is exclusive, reactive, but it's still a vital thing. He would have to be dead to stop wanting Enjolras. He can want Enjolras even in moments like this one, when he's tugging Enjolras down with a hand at the back of his neck, when Grantaire's tongue is making promises with every firm pulse into Enjolras' mouth.

It feels--

No, be honest. It feels like the smoothest spirits, the perfect moments of just-drunk-enough, when nothing hurts and nothing's tipped over into nausea. It feels like given a long enough span without this, now that he knows how good it can be, Grantaire's physiology would grab hold of his bones and shake them in a tantrum of sheer withdrawal.

Enjolras pulls away and murmurs, "I have to finish that blog post before tonight."

He sounds torn about it, and his wonderful hands are restless on Grantaire's body, but Grantaire's known this man for long enough now to recognise when the unstoppable force of his work ethic is barrelling towards an otherwise pleasant activity. There's nothing to be done but sigh and move aside.

Grantaire settles down, with no more than a few sour faces, as Enjolras retrieves the laptop and sets it on his knees, charger plugged in and headphones firmly in place. The tap-tap of his fingers is very close to Grantaire's ear, an irregular lulling that elbows aside the worst anxieties when they try to rear up from the internal swamp of Grantaire's mind, filling the space left by his lack of motion.

The tapping becomes sparser. Fingers stroke over Grantaire's forehead and pick idly at the curls that fall there. Enjolras says nothing. Grantaire can feel a small pulse in his cheek and another in his temple, making fluttery comment where they're pressed against Enjolras' thigh.

This is. This isn't _talking about it_ , but it's not sex either. A surge of impossible yearning makes hot rims of Grantaire's eyes. It's unsettling. This is too much like a life that he could want, if he let himself.

Lying with his head pillowed on Enjolras' leg, Enjolras' hand in his hair, Grantaire suddenly understands Eponine's anger at Cosette for wanting it all.

After that day, Grantaire becomes even more careful to carve out spaces: here is the fact that his appetite has shrunk to a muddy trickle in a creekbed, and here is the dry headache of the morning, and here is the fact that he spent an hour yesterday crying for no reason, _no fucking reason at all_ , sitting on the couch feeling frustrated that he couldn't just make himself _stop_. And the more frustrated he got, the more he wanted to keep crying.

And here is the way Enjolras tilts his head back when Grantaire fucks him. And here is the way Grantaire's soul flares like torchlight when Enjolras meets his eyes across a room. And here is the relief of feeling normal and whole when he drinks, even as he wakes up the next morning with the shroud of his own numbness wound tighter and tighter.

Everything in its box.

"You're avoiding Eponine," Courfeyrac says, one afternoon. "Why?"

"Lies!' Grantaire shouts, clutching his chest and pretending to collapse over the bar. "To whom have you been speaking?"

"My roommate," says Courfeyrac. "Shocking, I know."

"Lies," Grantaire says more feebly. "I played backup for her two nights ago. Oh, Jesus. That eyebrow you're raising right there, that one is definitely direct from Combeferre. I can't deal with the two of you merging into some kind of judgmental super-being."

"Playing isn't talking," says Courfeyrac. "Marius thinks she misses you."

"Aw," drawls Grantaire. "Isn't that sweet of our resident pop idol?"

"Grantaire."

"See, we had this discussion about sour grapes, some time ago, and it suited me to be on the smug side rather than the jealous side, so now--" Grantaire bites down on his lip hard enough to hurt. That takes some doing. "'Ponine knows where to find me, if she can take the time out from enjoying her two-pronged onslaught of wooing."

Courfeyrac says, earnestly, "That's making excuses. A friendship takes work from both sides."

"Behold, a blatant attempt to change the subject!" Grantaire waves his hands at the tablet computer in front of Courfeyrac. "Are you working on something for the concert?"

You can't move, at the ABC, without your elbow hitting someone making #FreeCosette posters for the concert or helping Marius with his setlist for the concert or composing, singing, producing and rehearsing music for the concert. The air is so thick with idealism that Grantaire wants to sneeze. He thought the bar might provide a good escape, given that the only person in the main part of the club is Bahorel, wrestling with new parts for the drum kit. But Courfeyrac, long legs cat's-cradled around one of the stools, has been typing away with the unbothered look of a man who long ago learned to tune out the crashing sounds of uncooperative percussion.

"Actually, no," says Courfeyrac. He gives Grantaire a considering look, and then his enthusiasm visibly surges past whatever instinct of wariness he might be having. He spins his tablet around so that Grantaire can see the text. "You read some of those books that Musichetta likes, right?"

"You're writing a romance novel?"

Courfeyrac laughs. "Not quite!"

"... _the depths of our devotion, the steadfastness of our hearts_ , _the bright constellations of joy that our lives have become_..." Grantaire reads off the screen.

"This is a secret," Courfeyrac says severely.

Grantaire wants to reach up and touch his own face, where the mask of his interested expression is hovering like an air hockey puck over his everyday misery. He wants to pluck at his skin and shout, _what the fuck makes you think I can't keep secrets, when none of you can see me for what I am?_

Instead he zips his own mouth elaborately. Then unzips one corner enough to take a sip of whiskey, which makes Courfeyrac laugh again.

"So, Joly and Bossuet are going to propose to Musichetta," Courfeyrac says, lowering his voice.

Grantaire blinks. "I know Bossuet only did that one semester of law school, or whatever it was, but surely he can spot the glaring legal issue there."

"Obviously it wouldn't be a legal wedding," Courfeyrac says. "It would be a symbol. A statement."

"Oh, good," says Grantaire. "We're so short on those around here. I lie awake at night worrying about this group's tragic, deplorable lack of symbolic action and political statements. How are you involved in this proposal, anyway?"

Courfeyrac's sunny grin appears. "I'm writing it."

"Writing? Like writing vows?"

"Like writing a romance novel," Courfeyrac says. "You know Joly and Bossuet. If one of them has an idea and the other one likes it, an hour later it's ballooned to twice its original scope and grown three baby ideas."

"I lived through last winter's Great Baked Oatmeal Saga," Grantaire says darkly. "You don't have to tell me that Musichetta's the normalising force in that relationship."

"They want Musichetta's proposal to have a _story_. Multiple locations. Multiple participants. They asked me to write something suitably over-the-top and romantic."

"What have you got so far?" Grantaire inquires, intrigued despite himself.

"So far I've discovered that is very difficult, in modern-day Los Angeles, to hire someone to abduct a woman in a horse-drawn carriage," says Courfeyrac solemnly. "Apparently it violates Craigslist's terms and conditions."

"I can imagine," Grantaire says.

He's still smiling, but an unpleasant chill chases down his arms and up into his throat. Musichetta will end up with her love story, her absurd happy ending, and Cosette will drag hers into existence through sheer force of will--but that isn't what Grantaire is doing, is it? He's the cartoon character laying down tracks by hand in front of his own speeding train, and it's exhausting. It's mud sucking at his limbs.

And that's how it goes. Hours of his life dissolve in bafflingly small tasks, like the time he spends at odd hours of the day doing the weary and well-trodden dance of convincing himself to shower and failing.

He even makes it to sitting on the edge of the bed while his mind murmurs: _You showered two days ago, it's not that bad, would it really matter that much if you just lay down again? No. It wouldn't. Nothing matters that much anyway._

And a stubborn voice embedded in his gut says: _You remember this feeling from last time, don't you? When you ended up with nurses scraping you off a hospital floor? This is the point where you do something about it, instead of lying there like a lump._

 _Do what?_ Grantaire demands, clutching at it like an overlarge hand at a piece of thread.

Which is how he ends up in the waiting room at a medical clinic. He's been on their books since a single visit last year when he mildly sprained his ankle tripping in a street gutter--in broad daylight and mostly sober, like he was gunning for a Nobel Prize in irony.

He flicks through one of the magazines, which seems to be aimed solely at people intending to get married in Scottish castles. He considers pocketing it so that he can give it to Courfeyrac for inspiration, or slap the magazine-obsessed Montparnasse over the head with it, but the waiting room also contains a young black woman jigging a coughing toddler on her knee, and three separate elderly white ladies, all of them twice as well-dressed as Grantaire and giving him glances over the top of their reading glasses. Instead he shreds into tiny pieces a loose sheet of paper encouraging him to subscribe to the magazine, as though Scottish weddings were something that people adopted as an ongoing hobby.

"Grantaire?"

He jerks hard enough that the paper scraps flutter, noiselessly, to the floor.

Grantaire's mind is anxious with white noise, so he doesn't catch the doctor's name when the door closes and she introduces herself. She's a young woman, maybe the same age as Musichetta, and she taps her fingers nervously on the desk, but otherwise she looks calm. She looks like she wants to help.

"This was probably a mistake," Grantaire says, through a dry mouth. "I don't think you can help me."

"Well, tell me anyway," she says, "and we'll see."

Can't you tell? Grantaire wants to shout, like he's wanted to shout at everyone. Can't you see what's happening, isn't it all _over_ me, don't I look _wrong_ , how can I be suffocating and have it be invisible?

The doctor's face is kind and interested, and everything gets stuck in a sticky black ball in Grantaire's throat, and he can't speak.

"If it's something that's difficult for you to talk about, we can circle back to it," the doctor says, when the silence has gone on a while. She leans back in her chair and smiles at him. "Tell me a bit about yourself, Grantaire. Are you studying? Working?"

Grantaire inhales, slowly, and exhales. If he starts to talk about work then he'll talk about Enjolras, it's inescapable, and he doesn't want to tell her. It would be like vomiting tar onto her nice skirt, and what could she even _do_ about it, about the complete fucking mess that Grantaire has made of his own life? How can he expect her to fix any of it? And eventually she'll ask him how much he drinks on an average day, just like the emergency room doctors always did, and she'll ask him if he's ever had _suicidal thoughts_ , and Grantaire will feel the muscles of his cheeks tighten in shame and he'll lie. He'll lie to this nice girl whose job it is to fix the unfixable.

"I'm sorry," he says, "I'm, shit, I'm sorry," and he climbs out of the chair and leaves, anger and despair thundering in his ears, because that took most of the money he had and he couldn't even sit still for long enough to try. What a fucking, fucking waste.

He remembers Alain-with-an-I, of the bright orange apron. Tell me your problem and I'll see what I can do.

Grantaire wishes this was as easy a problem as a new paint job. That Grantaire's whole self could be scrubbed away with sanding boards, leaving a smooth blank surface, ready to start anew. As it is, he's a minefield, throwing himself again and again at the person most likely to set off an explosion, and somehow remaining intact. Nothing about it makes sense. He's bracing himself for the clean cut, for Enjolras to end this for good, to leave Grantaire bobbing like an unmoored dinghy in his wake.

It doesn't happen. Perhaps Enjolras just has too much to do, at the moment; perhaps 'come to my senses and stop fucking Grantaire' has been crowded out of his to-do list by everything else he has to do for the concert and the launch of his label. Enjolras and Cosette are a two-headed monster of insomnia and overwork, frantically writing and producing. They spend so much time in the recording studio that Grantaire could paint a new mural onto the walls, featuring them in starring roles, and nobody would know the difference.

He interrupts them, sometimes, when he can build up the nerve to do it.

"Hey, taskmaster general. Don't you think you could use a break?"

Enjolras links his hands and stretches them out in front of him, but doesn't look like he's about to stand. His frown is focused and disapproving.

"Come on," Grantaire adds, "not even you two can live with all work and no play."

"Better that than the other way around," says Enjolras.

And that one lands square on Grantaire's gut-deep knowledge that he's fundamentally lazy, that he's out of place in this group of hard workers and fierce achievers. He _knows_ it's true. Dig down to the root of him and there's...nothing.

He fumbles for his flask and takes a drink. "Got me there," he flings out. Something in his voice must catch on Enjolras, who looks up sharply, and whose eyes land on the flask.

"Don't trouble yourself," Grantaire sneers. "I'll disappear. You get back to work."

"I'm coming with you," Cosette says firmly. "Sorry, Enjolras. My brain's buzzing. I could probably use a snack and a few songs composed by someone else."

Cosette makes tea in the kitchen and settles her guitar onto her lap while it's brewing, fingers drumming fondly on the wood. She steals occasional glances at Grantaire. He knows she's disappointed by the failure of her matchmaking scheme, and worried about them; well, she can take a number and stand in line. It's not like she hasn't got enough problems of her own to keep her busy in the meantime.

Grantaire crouches by his backpack where he kicked it into a corner earlier today, and to his relief discovers a bottle that's still a third of the way full. He refills his flask and queries his stomach about the possibility of coffee; it gives a weak spasm of protest at the idea, acid rising into his throat.

"How are you feeling, fairy sprite?"

"Oh, you know. Utterly and totally stressed." Cosette's face brightens momentarily, at odds with the words, and she strums her way cleanly through an intro that it takes Grantaire a while to recognise as the Cranberries. Her brown eyes give a deliberate dart towards the hall leading to the recording studio, and Grantaire can't help but laugh. Nineties music.

Cosette plays the bars of intro again and this time she launches into the song itself. She must have been singing for hours today already, but the roughness sits well on her voice, giving her a hint of Eponine's smokiness.

 _"And the thing that gets to me, is you'll never really see_ …"

She looks so wistful on those words that Grantaire joins in. As soon as he lands on the melody, an octave below, Cosette dimples a smile at him and leaps away from it, sending her sugary descant off into a harmony. Feuilly, who appears halfway through and is on a clear mission for some leftover cupcakes in the fridge, slaps his flip-flops against the floor in an improvised tap-dance, nodding at the both of them as he disappears again with blue frosting already adorning his mouth.

At the end of the song Cosette shakes her head, rueful, and puts the guitar aside so that she can wrap her hands around the mug of tea.

"Well, I'm not sure if I feel better," she says. "Every song in the world is about _them_ , these days, even when it's not."

"That's the problem with music," Grantaire agrees. "Why do any of us bother? We should all just give up, go home, resolve to remake our lives in the image of something less prone to showing us our own emotions. Something less painful. Sword-swallowing, perhaps."

At the moment he'd rather hold the edge of a blade in his throat than the song that Cosette chose for them to sing, because it's a neutral shade of longing: it goes with everything, with every personal drama, his included.

_And the thing that freaks me out_  
_Is I'll always be in doubt_  
_It is a lovely thing that we have..._

Yes. Lovely.

When Cosette finally coaxes Enjolras to leave the studio for his own break, while she keeps on writing in relative silence, Grantaire is still humming the song. It's rendered him punchy and loose and ready to pick a fight. He sits on the edge of Enjolras' bed and beats his frustration out with bare heels against the floor.

"I wasn't implying that you never do any work," Enjolras says, when the bedroom door closes behind him.

The mild, deliberate conciliation in his voice just makes Grantaire more angry. This is how it is, now, when they're in the same room: Grantaire opens his mouth and it's like the fact of how much in love he is is a boulder, stubbornly blocking everything good that could possibly come out, and he can't shift it because that's not what they are, they _aren't talking about it_ \--and so instead everything that leaks around the boulder's edges is thin and nasty.

"Fuck you, Enjolras, that's exactly what you were doing. Not that you were wrong."

"Then _do_ something," Enjolras says. "I know it bothers you, or you wouldn't be so--and you can do things, you do _have_ talents. You could do so much more with your life."

"Christ, you really _are_ a robot. Could you sound any more like a patronising asshole of a guidance counselor? Any _less_ like you give an actual shit?"

Enjolras' face closes down even further, reinforcing Grantaire's fucking point for him. "And now you're being--"

"Let me guess: obtuse?"

"Yes." Enjolras crosses his arms. "Someone has to believe in your potential, Grantaire, as it's quite clear you won't do it for yourself."

In another world that might even have been touching, but it's saltwater bang on the scraped-raw places left after Grantaire's failed visit to the doctor.

"Sure, yes, wow, that's all it takes. Belief. _Magic._ Your powers of healing are vast indeed, Apollo. And is that what this is? A laying on of hands?" The laughter comes out of him like an alien being. He crowds up close to Enjolras. "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the organ on which your hands have been _laid_ most frequently. Maybe you should adjust your aim."

Enjolras tries to take a step back, and hits the door. Grantaire follows, letting the space between them combust. Enjolras' breath catches and he says, "If that's how you feel, maybe I should--"

"Yeah, but you won't," Grantaire breathes. He presses a kiss, filthy and loose, to Enjolras' lips. He rubs his palm gently over the front of Enjolras' jeans and smiles, crooked with half of his mouth, when Enjolras shudders and grabs hold of Grantaire's hips. Grantaire knows what Enjolras likes now; he knows what his weaknesses are.

Grantaire's mouth is hot and he wants Enjolras like he wants the clink of ice against his teeth, like obliteration, like the iron craving of anaemic blood. Less than oxygen and more than water. Fuck. _Fuck_.

Another laugh bubbles out of him. "You'd better not say you want to talk any more, because I'm not going to believe you."

"I don't know what to say to you," Enjolras says.

Grantaire says, "Good," and goes to his knees.

Later he'll remember that exchange and he'll hear the bewilderment, the actual works that Enjolras was speaking, but at the time all he hears is what he wants to hear: no, we don't have to ruin this yet. We don't have to talk.

Because it all seems so ugly, and sometimes Grantaire wonders how on earth they're surviving it, how they _will_ survive it. The answer, of course, is that they won't. One of these fights will be the bottom of the cliff, the minefield triggered, the explosion that leaves them splattered over every surface, unable to piece back together even the tentative sort of friendship they were working on before Cosette shoved them at one another.

And then comes the rotten Wednesday, three days before the concert. The overstrung instrument of everyone's stress is unbearable, thrumming at the edge of pain, and Grantaire forgets about his mental boxes and the care he's been taking not to puncture the thin, _thin_ veneer of cowardice and plausible deniability that's been keeping his friends from interfering. Finally even Joly is furious and snapping at him. Grantaire can tell he's reached some point that's going to be difficult to come back from, just because of that.

There's a fight. Grantaire's in the midst of it but he's not hearing it, not hearing what he's saying because the word themselves don't matter. He knows what he's doing. He's pushing for them to tell him, because Enjolras won't--just _tell_ him that he's burned this bridge as well, that this illusion of a family and a life was never his to have.

It's Eponine who slaps him in the face.

Grantaire's too far gone to feel pain, but startled enough to focus. Eponine's eyes are full of tears. There are lines of panic and contempt by her nose.

"If you ever get this drunk here again," she says, "you will be banned from the premises."

 _There_ , Grantaire thinks. An abyss has opened in his stomach, but above it he's floating on the vicious cloud of being proved right. _There_.

"Fantastic," he drawls. "One for the road, then?" and Eponine's face darkens, and they're off again.

Dimly Grantaire is aware that there are now at least two other crescendoing arguments going on, unrelated to him. The group is splintering off into these pockets of chaos. It's as though the tension of the past weeks has been lying in wait, searching for a weakness in the floodgates.

"If I'm being kicked out--"

"We're not kicking you _out_ , you just can't--"

" _Shut up!_ "

You forget, when she's not singing, how much voice Cosette has. It cuts through the din like a pendulum through mist. Words die in mouths; every face in the room turns in her direction.

"Shut up!" she shouts again. She's at Enjolras' laptop, putting a CD into the drive. "I'm putting on the song!"

 _The_ song. The song written for her by her long-dead mother. They all know she's been carrying the disc around since her father gave it to her, but she hasn't gathered the nerve to listen to yet.

Grantaire forces himself to takes a deep breath. Holds it. He feels a little calmer as it leaves him.

They listen. The piano line is simple and Fantine's recorded voice swims through the pure and agonised notes. She's only recognisable as the grunge star Grisette when her voice grinds down on brief syllables, and even then, Grantaire might not have made the connection if he hadn't known already.

Cosette is crying, all of her bent to the magnetic pole of her mother's voice. She cries silently and everyone is silent in the face of her grief. The music, even thinned by the laptop speakers, fills the room like a warm gas. Grantaire can hear each rough, gulping inhalation of the singer. It takes him a while to realise that he is sucking in air whenever Fantine does. He might be shaking.

The song ends, but Grantaire can still feel it on his cheeks, can still hear the wistfulness and shame making stabs at his ears. _I never was there, was there when it counts_.

"R."

He looks up. Light catches on drying tears on Eponine's cheeks. She crouches down and holds out a glass of water and Grantaire takes it. He almost flinches when she kisses his forehead, as though some essential barrier has been stripped from his skin.

"'Ponine…"

She sits. Her arm, thin and firm, wraps across his shoulders. With her other hand she reaches out and squeezes the hand of Marius, who has his arm around an exhausted Cosette.

This is his sister, who he's on the verge of losing. He's grateful for her silent support, but he can't ask her for any more than she's already given. What else could she do?

That night settles something in Grantaire. It takes every remaining scrap of his self-control not to go back to Enjolras after that, but he bolsters it with self-loathing, and gets by. This is now officially something that won't stay in its box. Grantaire can feel it slipping out of his control. He has to stay away.

He drinks. Obviously. On his own dime, keeping it away from the ABC. That Friday night he drinks sitting cross-legged on his bed while his laptop's fan chugs pathetically in the heat, and he clicks on the YouTube link that Courfeyrac has sent out to everyone. It's the segment that played on the evening news the previous night: Cosette and Enjolras announcing the completion of her new record, and reminding the viewers about the benefit concert.

Cosette is tired but blazing, her hair coming loose from her braids. Grantaire is glad for the bright-eyed schoolgirl who sang in a café when she still believed in the world; he's even glad that she could find some of that belief again at the ABC. He did the right thing, removing himself from the danger zone. She deserves this success. She doesn't need an incipient disaster hovering around; none of them do.

Enjolras is in the background of the video as Cosette talks excitedly. He's wearing a truly awful shirt, some kind of faded orange paisley print. He looks at Cosette and rubs at his neck once, and Grantaire shivers with a sudden blow, the memory of how Enjolras sounds when Grantaire sets his mouth to the pulse beneath his jaw.

There's a knock on his bedroom door, and then Joly opens it.

"Grantaire?"

Grantaire pauses the video. "What?"

"It's for you." And then, as though he can hear how strangely formal he sounds, Joly shakes his head. "I mean, Enjolras is here. To talk to you."

Grantaire waits for the panicked leap of his heart into his throat to subside, casts a single glance around the crisis zone of his bedroom, and has stumbled out into the living area before he can second-guess it or even consider that he had the right--the sensible obligation, even--to just slam the door in Joly's face and refuse.

"I'll just," says Joly, brimming with awkwardness, and escapes into the master bedroom.

Enjolras hasn't even stepped into the apartment; he's hovering in the building's hall like the uninvited visitor he is, with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He's wearing the same hideous shirt he was wearing in the video, which means he's been wearing the same shirt for two days. That's something they have in common, then.

The very fact that Enjolras has left the club seems irrationally momentous. Grantaire is probably staring at his neck like some kind of deranged vampire. He forces himself to lift his eyes.

"Enjolras," he says. The floor is rocking gently beneath his feet as his body protests being asked to stand upright for the first time since he cracked the second bottle of wine. He tries to scrape some brain cells together. "It's--what time is it?"

"One in the morning." 

"One in the morning. The benefit concert is tomorrow."

"The concert," Enjolras pounces. "I wanted to check that you were still going to play."

"You could have texted."

"Yes." An awkward breath. "Cosette and Marius and Eponine are asleep on the kitchen floor, at the club."

"That's a lot of ands." Grantaire runs his fingers up and down the door frame, half for balance, half finding the strength--or the inertia, more like--not to reach for Enjolras, not to bury his face in Enjolras' throat and promise impossible things. "So she's got what she wanted. All of it. Good."

Enjolras passes a hand over his forehead. His eyelashes are a dark smudge, his cheekbones perfect. He's gorgeous and strained and exhausted and so out of place, standing here on the threshold of Grantaire's misery.

"Grantaire, I--"

Grantaire is not going to be able to cope with whatever is coming next. He--he's not capable. He's falling apart at the seams. Disaster or true emotion: he can't hear the one and he doesn't deserve the other.

"You _can't,_ " he says desperately. "Don't you get that by now? You can't make me into a cause. Stick with the ones you have a chance of winning."

"That's not what I--" Enjolras presses his lips together, runs his restless hand through his hair. As usual, this makes it look even better. "I told you I'm not blind. I know something's wrong, but if you won't _tell_ me, I don't know...I don't know what to do."

Something. _Something_ is wrong. What a grand fucking insight. Grantaire swims with rage and horror and resentment, despite the fact that he's been half-wanting to be seen, to be recognised, all this time. Not by Enjolras. Enjolras was supposed to be the good thing.

Well, it's not like he hasn't managed to fuck that up anyway. So what does it matter?

"Nothing," he says. "You do nothing."

A flash of irritation that's close to pain. "I see. Your solution to everything."

Grantaire feels sick. "I think you should go."

"Grantaire."

No, no, _Christ_. " _Go_."

Enjolras goes.

Grantaire stands for long minutes, forehead pressed against the closed front door as the floor drifts and rocks beneath his feet, before straightening. He's half expecting either of his roommates to appear again, but their bedroom door remains shut.

He's thinking again about Fantine's overdose, about what addicts do to the people in their life, about Cosette's tear-stricken face--and even as he's thinking it and hating himself for it, he's in the kitchen searching for something he can use to push away the hate. He's drunk enough that he fumbles the bottle and it breaks on the floor, and he stands there holding on to the kitchen island for support, staring at the sharp shards of glass in the red pool of wine.

He manages to make it to the bathroom before he throws up.

Afterwards his mouth tastes foul and he gargles water until he feels weak, diluted, and then he curls up on his bed with his hands in his hair, wanting to squeeze the throb and the blackness out of his head. He's sick of it. He's sick of himself. He just ran away from the man he loves--yes, hell, _loves_ , still and always and with a surety that makes him want to shake into a hundred fragments with the strength of it--and a group of people who haven't given up on him, who are happy to have him around.

These thoughts seem like they should be leading him somewhere, but he passes out before he can discover exactly where that is.

Grantaire sleeps, and keeps sleeping. He sleeps for most of the day, his body finally making a bid to catch up on all the nights when rest snatched itself out of his reach. From time to time a stab of sunlight wakes him, and blurred worry tries to revive his conscious mind, but he always settles back into a doze before it can fully form.

Eventually comes the moment when he wakes up and glances at his phone and reality crashes in like shrapnel through the ceiling. The benefit concert.

He's out of time. This is it. He gets out of bed, or he doesn't and it's too late.

Grantaire's stomach is soft and sour and his eyes ache. He lifts his hand to rub at his face, and his limbs are heavy as though he's moving through mud, and--

 _Enough_.

The thought feels more like a spoken word, like it comes from outside his head and lands in his mind like a splash of cold water.

_That's enough. Decide._

A force that Grantaire can't name, but which feels as stubborn as a boulder, takes hold of his limbs and propels him up and into the shower. It might be fear. It might be something else.

He washes quickly and ends up stealing a black shirt from the pile of Joly and Bossuet's clean laundry that he almost trips over. Trickling down through him is the realisation that after years of flirting with it, he's now made the acquaintance of rock bottom. And to his own great surprise, he's not looking around for a pneumatic drill. Even if he deserves it, he doesn't want this to be what the rest of his life looks like. He's going to find a way out.

When Grantaire arrives at the club, Enjolras and Bossuet are poring over the exposed guts of the sound system, which is normal. Less normal is the size of the heaving, chanting crowds he had to push through on the sidewalk before he made it to where Bahorel had cracked the door and was waving him in with a look of naked relief.

Grantaire hesitates, then feels his fragile nerve flood out of him. Instead he makes a beeline for Cosette, who is a vibrating bundle of nerves in a pretty dress, her glittery fingernails flashing as she winds her hands through and over one another.

"You made it!" she shouts at the sight of Grantaire, and gives a jittery leap to wrap her arms around his neck. Her cheeks are pink with excitement when she pulls away, and he pinches one of them. Cosette wrinkles her nose. "Seriously, Grantaire."

"Didn't think I'd miss it, did you?" he says, forcing some lightness.

The sound system crackles and whines to life, and there's a collective wince, followed by expressions of relief.

"Combeferre," Enjolras calls.

"Tell the restless masses we're five minutes from opening?"

Enjolras glances questioningly at Marius. "Ten? Ten."

"This will be the fastest soundcheck known to man," Marius says to Cosette. The two of them stride onto the stage, where Courfeyrac and Bossuet are already nudging amps and chairs into position for Marius' opening set.

Enjolras spends a few minutes with Feuilly, who's adjusting cameras for the live broadcast. Grantaire stays where he is, tucked against the wall, flicking from nonsense to nonsense on his phone. When he looks up it's more from bodily sense, a presence that he's been attuned to for a long while, then because of any particular sound.

Enjolras is standing in front of him. Grantaire puts his phone away. It's both absurd and inevitable that now, after every high and every disaster, the sight of Enjolras can be as much of a blow to the drumskin of Grantaire's heart as it was the first time.

"I'm sorry," Grantaire blurts.

Enjolras has the pale-lipped look that accompanies his anger. This time it melts into raised eyebrows. "For what?"

Grantaire laughs, incredulous and explosive as a sneeze. "For _what_? Would you like the list chronologically, alphabetically, or in iambic pentameter?"

"You're here," Enjolras says.

"Yeah."

"Grantaire," and now he looks like he's going to grab hold of Grantaire, but stops short. "I didn't know if you were, I mean, if you wanted to..."

"No, I want to," Grantaire says. "I do still want to. If you'll let me."

They appear to have gathered an audience. There's a muffled sound off to the side that's probably Cosette, emotional busybody extraordinaire, stifling the urge to help. She's helped enough. This is on them, now, and Grantaire will not, will _not_ be surprised when Enjolras realises that Grantaire is not going to stop fucking things up and letting people down, that musical epiphanies are one thing but reality is another. Nobody's faith is bulletproof.

Enjolras takes a deep breath in, his whole chest rising with it, then exhales. Someone else starts to say something and is shushed.

Grantaire doesn't look away. Enjolras doesn't either.

Enjolras reaches out and takes hold of Grantaire's wrist. His fingers are careful and the silver of his bracelet glints around his arm, and memory giddies around Grantaire like a helpless ghost. They're on a winter street in Portland and they're watching each other with held breaths, daring themselves to take what they want. They're here and they've taken everything, they've done everything, except admit that this could be real.

Enjolras tightens his fingers, and smiles, and leads Grantaire up onto the stage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Cranberries song that goes with every kind of romantic insecurity, like a good black purse, is 'Animal Instinct'. And if you haven't read The People Sing: the song Fantine records for Cosette is ['Playboy Mommy'](http://littledust.tumblr.com/post/36104944184/joannanewsome-tori-amos-playboy-mommy-live).


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three years later...we're done. Thank you so much to everyone who read & commented & put up with the DEEPLY INTERMITTENT updates. This is for you.

After Marius plays his opening set--to a sea of raised camera phones and a lot of incredulous screeching from people whom, Grantaire assumes, have room for both _American Idol_ and the teachings of DJ Enjolras in their social conscience--Eponine takes her place at the piano.

"So here's the thing," she says into the mic, and then sits back and sweeps her hair over her shoulder. Her fingers start to run like water over the keys. She leaves it a good while before she leans in again. "I've got a new song I want to play for you tonight, and--wow, okay," flashing a smile out over the audience as cheers interrupt her. "I have to dedicate this song to a couple of people, they know who they are. But I also wrote it thinking about a friend of mine. I think both of us have been having a hard time remembering where we belong, recently. What home means. Who we are, and who we want to be. I hope he knows I'm still here for him."

Grantaire feels a bony elbow touch his arm. He glances sideways and finds Marius standing there, hairline still beaded with sweat from the stage lights, water bottle in hand.

 _That's you_ , Marius mouths earnestly.

 _Thanks_ , Grantaire returns.

The tune changes, dipping in and out of songs Eponine has played before. Grantaire hears the start of Joni Mitchell's 'River', Eponine's own 'Shadowboxer', like an overture at the theatre, giving tastes of the themes yet to come.

Finally Eponine says, "This is 'A Better Version Of Me'. And I mean that."

Another smile, and then the piano picks up a new melody. Grantaire doesn't recognise it. A lot of things have been writing themselves in his absence. He won't, _won't_ allow himself any self-pity in that regard.

Eponine is brilliant, holding the audience and leading them down every path her voice lays out. She performs with a proud fire that's old and a radiance that's new.

Marius sticks his fingers in his mouth and honest-to-God whistles, during the applause for one of the songs. He's watching Eponine like a man who's discovered a secret passageway in the house he's lived in for years.

"You really didn't know how she felt about you," Grantaire says, before he can stop himself.

Marius looks at him. He has a wide mouth which paints ruefulness well, and his eyes are a sweet flash of hazel in a sea of freckles backgrounded by a blush. He's far too easy-going to be anywhere close to Grantaire's type, but it's not like Grantaire can't see the appeal.

Grantaire and Marius have never been close; Marius was Courfeyrac's, first, and then he was everyone's. Sometimes the two of them jammed together--casual covers, nonsense mashups like the one they played at acoustic night--before Grantaire's mental health tossed his social life out the window like a smouldering butt from a moving car.

When it comes to the triangular whirlpool that is this particular romance, it's no secret where Grantaire's first loyalty lies.

"I really didn't," Marius says. "Did you--did you think I did? I'd never have laughed at her, if she'd told me."

"But you might have turned her down."

"Maybe," Marius says steadily. He shrugs. "I'm not great with hypotheticals. Maybe I'd have started thinking about it, and I'd have realised that I _could_ want her like that. Because I can. I do."

Or she might have told him, and he might have wanted to keep things the same between them, because that's the safer bet. Or he might have said yes, and they'd have crashed together at the wrong angle and fallen apart again. Or it might have been simply the wrong time in their lives.

"Sometimes I think happiness is more pure fucking luck than anything else," Grantaire says, watching Eponine's face.

"Some of it is," Marius says. Marius, whose grandfather's illness was a fluke of timing that wrenched him away from the wave of his rising fame, his chance at success. It's incredible how good-natured he's turned out, where some people might have been left bitter by it. "I think most of it takes work, though."

A wave of grey exhaustion tries to rise from the soles of Grantaire's feet. He manages to keep it away from his face. There's work to be done. He doesn't know if he's got enough energy to do it, but he has to try.

Cosette is standing nearby. She's looking more petite than usual next to the imposing elderly white man who's got one of her hands clasped in his. This must be her adoptive father. He seems familiar, somehow, but he's decades older than the ABC's main demographic, and Grantaire can't place him in any other context.

The two of them drop hands at the end of Eponine's set, and applaud furiously. Cosette is bouncing on the balls of her toes. She looks up into her father's face and he puts his hands on her shoulders and says something to her, his pale blue eyes creasing with a fond expression.

"I'm not saying that was _better_ than sex, but I'm saying I'm going to need some convincing in that direction," comes Eponine's voice.

Marius' blush comes back and brings some friends. The pinkness spreads down his neck as Eponine, smile sparkling on her mouth like diamonds, kisses his cheek with a smacking sound.

"You were amazing," Marius says.

"Yeah," Eponine says. "You know, I think I was." Releasing Marius, she turns to face Grantaire.

Grantaire wants to pull out one of his effusive, sardonic compliments, but all he can do is keep his mouth level and nod. Eponine steps in and hugs him, hard and brief like the slam of a door.

"I'm glad you're here," she says, fierce. "I'm sorry I yelled."

"I--yeah." The strength of her arms has loosened the words in his throat. Her hair smells like smoke and oranges. "I'm sorry too." He's going to be apologising for a long time, to a lot of people. He thinks about his mother's emails with a flutter of guilt.

Eponine says, quiet, "Be happy for me, R."

"I don't know," Grantaire says. "Don't you think you're settling? I _did_ offer you my hand in marriage. It's not too late. Throw over these absurdly talented people, 'Ponine, come and share the squalour of my shitty apartment--"

Eponine, laughing, starts to reply, but the chant rising from the crowd has become a roar and she settles for rolling her eyes. Cosette and Enjolras are on stage now. By accident or design, both of them are wearing red: a shirt with rolled-up sleeves for him, a dress with a plunging neck and yellow lace trim for her. The first song in the set is just her voice and his backing, a gleeful synthetic throb that has the crowd clapping and bouncing in time. Enjolras' hands skim over the deck and he nods along, but the spotlight is firmly on Cosette. This is her night.

"Thank you, again!" Cosette shouts, when the applause has barely started to die. "It means so much to me, to be able to share my music with all of you. Even if we win tonight, if this album becomes truly mine in the _legal_ sense, it's never going to be _only_ mine. It exists because of the incredible DJ Enjolras and everyone else here at the ABC. What do you think, should I ask them to give me a hand with the rest of the songs?"

Marius touches Grantaire's shoulder as he walks past him and towards his guitar, already set up on its stand. Grantaire follows him into a wall of sound like blasted air, as the hyped crowd yells its enthusiasm. He pulls the strap of his bass over his head.

Cosette wraps her hand around the microphone. Her shoulder blades shift beneath her skin as she firms her posture. She says, "This is 'Lights'."

And there are lights in their eyes, but not so many that Grantaire can't see the mass of people that fills the ABC from the stage to the furthest wall, packed deep and close. He's not usually prone to stage fright, but his reserves are low, and his chest tries to fill with panic like two fists pulling a rope tight. He drops his eyes to the stage, tracing the pale arc of a scuff mark in front of his feet.

He finds that he's playing, that he met his cue anyway. Rehearsals and gigs were the only things he bothered to show up for, over the past few weeks; he knows these songs like the street he lives on, like the line of Enjolras' mouth.

The fight breaks out while Enjolras is giving one of his usual short speeches between songs. At first it looks like dancing, but then Bahorel is shoving his way towards the knot of shouting people, and someone's on the ground--Grantaire cranes to see. Maybe someone got bored in the queue and they're already drunk or high, or maybe it was inevitable: too much buildup, too many bodies pressed together. Too much righteous anticipation in the air, breathing hotly, an invisible ribcage heaving with the energy of the crowd. Enjolras has always known how to channel an anger that's larger than just music. That kind of thing, too, can get out of its box.

And then, into the knife-edge between unrest and disaster, strides Jean Valjean.

"Cosette left one last guest artist off the list," he says into the microphone, and Grantaire _still_ doesn't get it until Cosette's elderly father hoists the guitar into the air and the stencilled numbers, 24601, catch the light like they're snatching at it.

Grantaire's probably staring at Cosette like she's grown a tail and a pair of fuzzy ears, but God _damn_. Her mother was Grisette and she was raised by _Johnny fucking Rocker_? Nature and nurture; no wonder she's this brilliant. Grantaire's grudgingly impressed with himself for recognising her talent back when she was a teenager in polka dot shoes, struggling to breathe through her own songs.

Turns out nothing can settle a fight like the threat of expulsion from a club where one of the great rock idols of the past few decades has just appeared, iconic instrument in hand, for a surprise pop-up gig.

Valjean starts to sing and Grantaire forgets where he is. A voice scratched with time has reached out from his memory, and Cosette is wrapping her own fearless song around it. Hundreds of people have gone dead quiet. There are lights in Grantaire's eyes. This, this is what music is _for_.

He lets himself glance, once, at Enjolras. Enjolras is looking back at him.

"Come on, I think they could use some backup," Eponine whispers, leaning away from her mic and towards Grantaire. She leans back again and her piano begins to fill in the picture, a backwash of colour to bring out the vocal melody even further.

Grantaire says, "Wha-- _what_ ," and for a good ten seconds everything he knows about how to play music goes right out of his head, fingers numb on the strings, before the sullen and starry-eyed fifteen-year-old version of Grantaire that still exists deep within him grabs firm hold of the reins.

This is 'Wild Horses'; Grantaire's awful high school garage band, the one that existed for all of three sessions, played this song, back when Grantaire thought he knew what it meant to feel the pain of inevitable loss. It's always had a special place under his skin. And now he's playing backup for Johnny Rocker himself. His life has never been more fucking surreal.

As the band builds up the sound, the audience begins to move again, and then to sing along. Cosette sweeps them all along: through her father's song, through the moment when the marquee shows everyone the donation total and she realises that she owns her music, and onwards.

When her voice is starting to scrape in her between-song speeches, she finally bows out.

"I think our beloved leader has agreed to take over the speakers now," is her parting shot, throwing her dimples back to Enjolras. He smiles at her, one hand already moving dials on the deck, and the throb of a quick techno mix starts to rise.

Grantaire is halfway down a bottle of water when a splash from another one catches him full in the face. He surfaces, spluttering and shaking his curls from his eyes, to see Cosette. Her lipstick is a shade darker than her usual pink, and smudged; Grantaire doesn't even bother to look around to discover the state of Eponine's mouth.

"Come and dance with me!" Cosette shouts.

Grantaire sets his bottle down against the wall, willing enough. Cosette drags him onto the dancefloor, where they're interrupted about seventeen thousand times by well-wishers and fans. Grantaire makes sure she's still enjoying herself before he retreats to where Eponine has her arms around Marius and they're dancing with enough energy to discourage anyone who might be lurking for an autograph from an _American Idol_ favourite.

He catches Eponine's eye and she releases Marius with a final kiss, then comes to squeeze Grantaire's hands.

"I _am_ glad you're happy," Grantaire says, belated, his mouth close to her ear. The music is too loud for easy speech. "It looks good on you."

Eponine's eyes are glorious pools of darkness. They crease as she smiles at him. "And I want you to be happy as well. No matter what that means. You've got people who love you."

"Okay," Grantaire says, "I retract my marriage proposal, you are _not_ the cynical Eponine Thenardier I know. You've cunningly replaced her with an identical model."

"Try me, my friend, I can still hate the world with the best of them." Her voice softens almost to the edge of hearing. "Just--not tonight."

No. Even Grantaire would struggle to give up on the world entirely, in an atmosphere like this one. Cosette's triumph has its kind and cunning fingers under the edge of his mask, and he's feeling things with all of his body. He suspects there'll be a drop, tomorrow, but right now he's overwhelmingly glad he managed to get himself here.

Combeferre ducks out from behind the bar, holding a fresh water bottle, and starts to push his way towards the stage. Following an impulse, Grantaire taps Eponine's elbow in farewell and goes to intercept him.

"Is that for Enjolras?"

"Is--oh, Grantaire. Yes. Here." 

For no real reason, it's the total lack of hesitation in Combeferre's manner, handing over the bottle, that brings Grantaire closer to tears than anything else has thus far.

He's not planning a conversation; Enjolras has his headphones on, even though he's letting a song play out with minimal tweaking at the moment. This is a gesture. Grantaire simply waits for his presence to seep in through the edge of Enjolras' narrow attention, nods, and then puts the water bottle into his hand.

As Grantaire starts to turn away, Enjolras reaches out with the bottle-holding hand, catches the front of Grantaire's T-shirt between two awkward fingers, and pulls him close again.

It doesn't last long. As kisses go, it could almost be described as casual, except that Grantaire feels it like the first breath of air-conditioning after hours in swamping outdoor heat. He could hold it in his lungs forever.

He might almost be able to delude himself that nobody saw it happen, but he knows better. They're on a stage, and Enjolras is Enjolras; even when his music is telling every cell in your body to twirl in an echo of its own DNA, even when he's silent and doing his best to be more medium than message, there will always be eyes upon him.

As far as gestures go, Grantaire has just been outclassed.

Grantaire tries to keep his own eyes lowered, as he goes back down to the dancefloor.

After that song Enjolras lets the music drop, signalling his intention to give another speech. Everyone around Grantaire is breathing hard, whispering, glad for a break.

"We've always fought on behalf of artists, to preserve the importance of pure creativity," Enjolras says. "Recently, Cosette has been trying to tell me the importance of _passion_. So I've been thinking about that. And here's the conclusion I've come to: she's right, but she's not completely right."

"Boo!" yells Cosette from somewhere in the crowd, but the end of it dissolves into laughter.

Enjolras says, "Emotions are...important. More important than I'd realised. But anger, alone, is not enough. Hope, alone, is not enough. It's when we _act_ that we create change. It's when we act that we know our true selves. Cosette created an album in less than a month; and all of you, by showing up here, by protesting, by signing our petitions, by donating, have shown us that we are not alone. That activism is neither a thing of the past, nor pure lip service. That the people will prove themselves to the cynics, if the cynics will let them."

For years Grantaire's gaze has been the compass needle finding Enjolras in any kind of space. Now Enjolras turns his head exactly the amount required to look at Grantaire, no more and no less. Grantaire is in a dancefloor crowd looking up at a red-clad Enjolras, who is looking back at him. The night they met is still casting its shadow forward and over them, catching on these these small symmetries.

Grantaire touches the side of his mouth with his thumb. He wonders that the contact doesn't burn; he feels incandescent, like a flare sent up from a ship.

"That's what I wanted to say," Enjolras says. He lifts his eyes again. The music begins to build. "There will be more victories. I believe that. Right now, it's time to dance."

In another hour the crowd has thinned considerably, and Enjolras plays what Grantaire recognises as a cool-down set, gently guiding the energies of the remaining clubgoers until Courfeyrac begins to raise the lights and the last of them stumble out.

Everyone who belongs here is still here. Bossuet and Bahorel are dismantling the stage setup, Combeferre and Eponine at work tidying the bar, and Jehan is swooping around the edges of the club picking up trash. But eventually all the work is done and they're still milling, laughing, leaning into one another, all of them on too much of a high to go home, no one willing to be the single atom that breaks the bond.

Grantaire is sitting with his legs dangling over the edge of the stage, calming the grumbling of his stomach with a packet of peanuts--of which he occasionally pelts one at Eponine's back, to distract himself from the fact that every cell in his body is crying out for them to be wine instead--when someone holding a guitar lowers themselves to sit next to him with a lot more clicking and huffing than is typical for Grantaire's friends.

"Grantaire, isn't it? You did a good job backing me up, earlier," says Jean Valjean.

Grantaire gapes at him. Then realises he is probably displaying a tongue coated in masticated peanuts, and swallows hard. He blames the sudden rush of salt for the fact that what comes out of his mouth is, "I had 24601 written on my arm for two months in high school."

Valjean looks taken aback. Then, when the ground fails to open and swallow Grantaire's shame whole, Valjean coughs and his expression becomes flattered. Probably. The beard makes it hard to tell.

"Did you really?"

"In green Sharpie," Grantaire confirms.

Valjean grins and says, "Here, then," and holds out the guitar.

Grantaire shoves the remaining peanuts into his pocket, wipes his fingers reverently on his jeans, and takes it. He only realises he's holding his breath when his chest starts to hurt.

"Thank you, sir," he comes out with next, even though he's not called anyone _sir_ since he was fourteen and still forced to speak to his asshole of a grandfather during holidays.

Jean Valjean, though, deserves a _sir_ if anyone in Grantaire's life does, and even has the tact not to do more than raise a couple of amused eyebrows.

"Papa, Grantaire, get down here!" commands Cosette.

A loose circle has started to form, on the dirty floor in the middle of the club. Grantaire and Valjean come down from the stage and join them; Grantaire sits cross-legged, his hands still not convinced they're holding what they're holding. He makes a few silent chords. The strings are just strings, he tells himself.

"The question is," says Courfeyrac, waving a bottle of beer by the neck, "what shall we sing?"

At least ten yelled suggestions fly at him at once, and he pretends to bat them away like insects.

As sometimes happens after too many people have spoken at once, an anticipatory silence falls. It's Marius who starts playing first, an intricate descending spill of plucked notes, and Marius' pleasant voice which spreads like ripples in milk.

" _I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told_ …"

Grantaire plays and listens until he's reminded himself of the chords, then joins the singing as well, layering his voice over Marius: " _\--seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go_."

They've got at least five good voices, four guitars, and a host of music-lovers who are more than happy to hum or sing along with the melody and to drum their hands against the floor in a explosion of percussion after every shouted _LIE-LA-LIE_ in the chorus.

Marius lifts a hand to point at Eponine, who leads them into the next verse: " _Asking only workman's wages, I came looking for a job…_ "

She in turn throws the lead to Grantaire: " _Then I'm laying out my winter clothes and wishing I was gone, going home…_ "

As Grantaire sings, Enjolras drops himself into the circle, right by his side. Enjolras isn't singing, but his face is open and his eyes alight. He settles himself comfortably. He puts a hand on Grantaire's knee and leaves it there.

As the chorus repeats in an ever-building circle, electric and triumphant, a shimmer of strings stretches over the sound. Feuilly, who plays more instruments than Grantaire can ever remember, has rejoined the group with a violin tucked under his chin. The notes he plays are long and glimmering, the singing rises to meet them, and the beat of palms against the floor now is like marching feet, like fists beating down a door.

Like right now, right here, they could knock something down.

Enjolras hasn't moved his hand. It's warm and sure on Grantaire's leg, and every so often he rubs gently with his thumb. Grantaire can't stop looking at it, when the song finally ends and a friendly, satisfied silence takes its place.

It's when we act that we know our true selves.

The thought bounces from corner to corner of Grantaire's mind and in turn sends lyrics spinning through it. No, not lyrics. _In moments of grace, we were verbs._

"Thanks," Grantaire says, passing 24601 back to Jean Valjean. "That was an honour."

He takes hold of Enjolras' hand and stands up. They won't be missed. On the other side of the circle, Cosette and Eponine are already starting the next song, dark heads bent together, Eponine demonstrating a harmony with rising and falling jabs of her hand.

Enjolras comes where Grantaire pulls him. Not far: just out of the main space of the club and into the kitchen, where the light is warm and they're out of sight.

"We need to talk," Grantaire says. "Actually talk."

Enjolras nods, relief falling over him as transparently as coloured light.

Grantaire casts about him for a place to begin. The way Enjolras looks at him now, the way he looked at him earlier tonight as he spoke about emotion, has planted a stubborn spark of hope. Even so: this might be the end of things between them. And that's...that's okay. That's better than letting things continue as they are. Grantaire, right now, has enough within him to believe that he'll survive it, if that's the case. He's survived everything else.

Enjolras looks so uncertain, standing there too-still and too-stiff, that Grantaire sets aside his first resolution and winds his fingers up into Enjolras' hair and pulls him close with the other arm, looped around his waist, banishing even the air from between them. After a couple of heartbeats, Enjolras' arms come around him as well.

This is new. It shouldn't be, but it is. The sheer, human relief of holding someone is intense.

Grantaire thinks about Musichetta's books. There are a hundred ways to say it, but it all boils down to the same thing. Grantaire tries the words out without sound, just his lips moving against Enjolras' shoulder: once, and then again.

The world doesn't end.

Enjolras is breathing slowly and his body has relaxed into Grantaire's, motionless as though he has nowhere else to be, no victory party demanding his attention.

"So," Grantaire says. "I love you. I've been in love with you for three years."

Once it's out, he manages to step back. Enjolras' lips are parted and his eyes are burning, which is how he looks when he's believing in something. That's fine; anyone could love Enjolras, and Grantaire's not hiding. He's never been _hiding_. He's just disguised this in mocking sketches, in a thousand jokes, in every song he's ever sung, in a three-day mural splashed across the walls of Enjolras' heart. He thought deniability would be enough. That's done now. He's done.

He says, "I loved you from the moment you kissed me. From the moment you bumped into me on the sidewalk outside that club. From the moment I heard your music on a stupid mix CD."

Enjolras' mouth twitches. "That's three separate moments."

"I don't care," Grantaire says, "they're all true," and Enjolras kisses him with his hands on Grantaire's cheeks, those soft and devastating kisses against which Grantaire has no defence at all.

"I should tell you something," Enjolras bursts out, after a while.

"What?" Grantaire says. He doesn't think this is going to be an admission in kind, not that he expected one. Enjolras looks, of all things, nervous. As though he's worried what Grantaire will think of him. Grantaire adds, "Look, the way I feel about you has survived two years of being ignored, and four weeks of believing we were one wrong move away from a fight that would bring my world down and probably require me to _leave town_. There's not much that can change my mind now."

"I should tell you," says Enjolras, "why I regretted what happened in Portland."

It's like a leisurely, sidelong punch in the gut. Enjolras must see something change in his face; he frowns and kisses Grantaire again, quickly, hard enough for their teeth to click. Something about it is like the way he beats time with one hand when composing: an anchor. A reminder. Then he steps away, a few paces. Turns.

"I tried to tell Cosette," he says. "I did tell her, and it made _sense_ ; it made sense to me for such a long time. I said you were my greatest failure to the cause, because I was using my fame for--for myself. I thought that what we did in Portland and the way I felt when you came to LA was some irrelevant part of me, which I could ignore. _Should_ ignore."

"Enjolras--"

"No, shut up, I'll get there," Enjolras says. "I know that was selfish. I thought it was _un_ selfish, but it was still about me, in the end. Do you think I--" He stops pacing, pulling to a halt right in front of Grantaire again. "There aren't many people who wouldn't want me to change," he says. "I mean. The whole point of it is--" This isn't Enjolras the speechmaker, whose rhetoric pours out easily. He looks frustrated, his hands jerking in attempts to elaborate. "I'm explaining this badly."

"Yeah, you really are," says Grantaire. "It's kind of awe-inspiring. Keep going."

"People are supposed to look at me and see the Cause," Enjolras says. "I thought, anyone who just saw _me_ , and not what I stood for--eventually, they would resent it, what I'm trying to do, and be. They'd want me to be less of that, and more of something else. Something easier to--to love." His voice trips on the words, and he's gone a bit pink.

"I don't want you to change," Grantaire says helplessly. "Enjolras, God, I've _never_ \--"

"I know." Enjolras takes Grantaire's head again between his twitching hands, as though to calm the both of them at once. "I know. I want everyone to believe in what I believe, I thought that was _all_ I wanted, but you." He tugs, tilting Grantaire's face up slightly to meet his gaze. He's still flushed and almost awkward. "There's so much in you, and you believe in _me_. I didn't realise that that might be something I needed."

"Oh," Grantaire says.

"That's what I was going to tell you. When Cosette said we should talk about…"

"Nineties music."

Enjolras nods. "I told you to come back the next morning because I wanted that time to sort out my thoughts. Arrange them."

"But I ruined that."

"Not single-handedly," Enjolras says, because it's Enjolras and he's making an effort to be fair. "I find it hard to hold to my scripts, around you. As you may have realised. And you were telling me what you remembered about Portland, and I--"

"Snapped," Grantaire says helpfully. "Is what you did."

"I'm sorry."

"Hey, I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong."

Enjolras is looking at Grantaire's mouth. "I've never wanted anything as much I wanted you in that moment."

Grantaire's heart stutters. "Really," he says. "What about truth, justice and an egalitarian music industry? What about _world peace_ , Enjolras--"

Enjolras tightens his grip and Grantaire leans into it, and Enjolras looks exasperated but he kisses Grantaire anyway. Grantaire laughs, and then they're both laughing, but still kissing through it, fond and relaxed. Grantaire can barely remember a time when he's felt _relaxed_ in Enjolras' company. It seems a good omen that he can manage it now.

He thinks about Cosette, tiny and fierce and huge-hearted, and so much braver than he is.

Grantaire steals a final kiss and then breaks away, so that they can look at once another.

"I love you, but it's not enough. No, just--listen," he says, in response to the sudden alarm on Enjolras' face. "If I stay, now, this isn't going to work. I need to sort myself out, and I told you, you can't do it for me. That's not your job. And if you try to make it your job, you'll end up hating me, and I'll end up--it doesn't matter. I don't need that. I need a--a rehab, or a hospital, or something."

As Grantaire gets the words out, Enjolras' face inches towards that careful, fragile neutrality. Grantaire touches his cheek, his forehead, coaxing the emotion back.

"We've always had bad timing," Enjolras says softly.

"You think I don't want to stay? You think I wouldn't give anything? It's fucking _awful_ timing, but in case it's escaped your notice, this a club, Enjolras. I work behind a _bar_. I have to get some distance. I can't do it here. I'm not strong enough, I'm not anything enough. I can't do it by myself."

It's an old, old thought, but he still feels pathetic admitting it.

Enjolras pauses. Then he says, "I have it on good authority that that's one of the first steps. See, you're doing fine already."

Grantaire stares at him, speechless. And then starts to laugh.

"It's not like I'm going anywhere," Enjolras says with satisfaction. "I'll still be here, whenever you feel ready."

"You don't have to--"

"Grantaire." Enjolras's familiar are-you-an-idiot look emerges. "Who on Earth would I be doing things with in the meantime?"

"You do have hordes of admiring fans," Grantaire points out. "Probably even more of them, after tonight."

"I don't sleep with my fans," Enjolras says.

"That is a blatant--" Grantaire cuts off as Enjolras' tongue touches his earlobe, gentle and deliberate, and instead he makes a gasping sound like _nnnnha._

"I sleep with infuriating artists who won't be swayed by even my best arguments."

"Please," Grantaire says, even as his heart rate picks up, "don't go looking for any more of them."

Enjolras says, "I was never looking for you."

He makes it sound like something else. Like an admission. Like a declaration.

"Funny," says Grantaire. "It feels like I was always looking for you."

Enjolras' face does something extraordinary. Grantaire leans in and kisses it, to see if it tastes different. Or just because he can. He says, content, "I'll leave tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," Grantaire murmurs, very close to Enjolras' mouth.

Neither of them moves to close the distance again immediately. Into the quiet, the music from the club space drifts. The singers now are Cosette and her father, voices once again wrapped around one another, both of them professional enough that the words carry clearly.

" _\--accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. And if your breath to you is worth saving…_ "

Grantaire knows how this one goes. Better start swimming.

"Come upstairs with me," Enjolras says.

"Yes," says Grantaire.

Upstairs, they don't even make it to the bed, for the first round. Grantaire has no objections, _none at all_ , to the way Enjolras presses him against the wall and takes him apart; he wouldn't mind being pressed _through_ it, he wants some memories and some marks he can carry away with him. He's gone enough to say that out loud. Enjolras stares at him, hand pausing in its quest to shove Grantaire's underwear down.

"Marks," Enjolras says, as though contemplating a legal document. "I think I can do that."

" _Fuck_ ," says Grantaire, "oh, Jesus," and Enjolras puts his mouth to Grantaire's neck at the same time as wrapping a hand around his cock, and it's basically the hottest thing that's ever happened, because now it's not an impossibility, but a promise. It says: I'm marking my place, and I'll be here again.

Grantaire closes his eyes and feels. His breath is winding up within him, harsh inhalations tripping on his throat like a flight of stairs. His hands are at the sides of Enjolras' ribcage, Enjolras hot and bony and vital through the fabric. Just as he knows Enjolras' weaknesses, so Enjolras knows his, by now: his grip on Grantaire is firm and fast. There's a bright electric road mapping itself between Enjolras' fingers and his mouth, zap-zap up through Grantaire's body. Joly said something once about electricity wounds. Lightning strikes. Entrance points and exit points--the path carved out--plumes of black on skin--

"Oh, I, oh God," Grantaire says, and comes.

His neck is throbbing. Enjolras has pupils like black pennies, a debauched mouth. Grantaire's come has striped the front of Enjolras' jeans; Enjolras glances down at them, makes a small face, and then simply unzips and climbs out of them.

The frantic sensation that was in the air, like the crackle of a storm, has begun to fade. Grantaire finds that his chest is tight and manages to breath it loose again, deliberately, taking his time. He is dreadfully anxious and dreadfully happy, and dreadfully anxious the happiness won't stay. The paradox swirls inside him.

Very slowly he reaches out for one of Enjolras' hands and lifts it to his mouth. He drops a kiss on the back of it.

"Take me to bed," he says, low and shameless. The next words are _whatever you want_ , but tonight, no, he's asking for what _he_ wants. "Fuck me. Do it slowly. And don't look at anything but me."

Enjolras lifts the shirt over Grantaire's head and tosses it aside. He sweeps his hands down Grantaire's bare back, using the motion to draw him near, fingers skimming his spine as though counting the vertebrae one by one. He rests his forehead on Grantaire's and then bites at his upper lip and says, hoarse and fervent, "You drive me out of my mind."

"Nobody can live in their mind all the time." Grantaire means every word.

Enjolras undresses, and takes Grantaire to bed, and fucks another orgasm out of him with the blazing beam of his attention fixed on Grantaire and nothing else. And Grantaire talks truths into Enjolras' smooth skin: _I'm afraid, but you make me think I could pretend not to be, and that it might be enough. I'm not sure I can do this, but I'm going to try_.

_I love you and it's the best thing about me._

Enjolras drags him briefly into the shower, afterwards, and then they crawl naked under the topsheet.

Grantaire has forgotten what it's like to not feel tired, but tonight he doesn't actually care if he sleeps, and for some reason he feels like that might mean he will. He lies quietly and he watches Enjolras.

Enjolras' finger traces a slow path down Grantaire's shoulder, past the soft crook of his elbow, all the way down his forearm, and Grantaire shudders his face for a moment into his pillow, suddenly and completely seized with a hot feeling like fresh tears.

It's almost too much. Most days he would still flay his skin from his bones for the chance to exchange it for something new, and that's not going anywhere in a hurry. Most days he knows he's a mistake that the world is making, a chemical weakness wrapped in dry words. And there's far too much tenderness in the way Enjolras, half-asleep, hooks his finger through Grantaire's and gives a smile that's young, private, stripped bare of battle.

It comes to Grantaire then that this, too, might be too big, too important for him handle without fucking it up. He'd prefer to gild Enjolras with an immortal name and not face the tired humanity burning beneath the belief. The man who wants Grantaire.

Grantaire would die for him, probably, and _easily_. Nothing would be easier.

This is not going to be easy.

"Hey," he says, just to watch Enjolras open his eyes.

"Hmm?"

"Nothing. I haven't got a follow-up," he says. "I just. I wanted."

Enjolras moves closer and kisses him, a gentle catch of their lips, unhurried and affectionate. He doesn't pull away. They breathe the air, together.

"You can do this," Enjolras says, "I love you," and faith burns in every syllable, burns Grantaire's lips with the simplicity of it, hot and bright and finally believable.


End file.
